Do moguls like Masayoshi Son, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison actually believe Artificial Super Intelligence is imminent?
As the polycrisis lurches into a new year, let us take a few moments to question the motivations of some of its leading actors and their stated belief system.
Do They Really Believe in ASI?
This quote from Shanaka Anslem Perera’s Substack got me thinking about the (likely delusional) belief system that is driving the multi-trillion dollar push for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)
Either the gods are being built in the Texas desert, or the greatest financial delusion in human history is unfolding in real time while sophisticated observers debate quarterly earnings.
It’s one thing to try to understand what’s happening on our planet using observation and reason, but the degree of difficulty increases considerably when one realizes that many leading actors are driven by ideologies and even eschatologies that are at best supra-rational and at worse completely insane nonsense.
World’s Dumbest Money Believes
For a specific example, let’s go back to Perera and his description of the stated beliefs of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son:
In the June 2024 transcript of SoftBank’s Annual General Meeting, buried on page forty-seven between a question about dividend policy and a disclosure about cross-shareholding arrangements, Masayoshi Son stopped being a businessman and became something else entirely.
“SoftBank was founded for what purpose?” he asked the assembled shareholders, most of whom had come expecting guidance on quarterly earnings and capital allocation strategy. “For what purpose was Masa Son born?”
The question was not rhetorical.
“It may sound strange,” he continued, his voice carrying the weight of a man who had spent four decades building toward a single moment of revelation, “but I think I was born to realize ASI. I am super serious about it.”
The room did not gasp. The financial press mentioned the comment in passing and moved on to earnings estimates. The sophisticated analysts covering SoftBank stock dismissed it as another grandiose proclamation from a man whose Vision Fund had become synonymous with venture capital excess, a man who had incinerated forty billion dollars on WeWork and whose investment judgment had been publicly questioned by shareholders, regulators, and journalists for years.
Former SoftBank exec Alok Sama put Son’s investment strategy in context for The Next Big Idea Book Club in late 2024:
In the mid-nineties, Masa foresaw the internet revolution. At the height of the 2000 tech bubble, he owned 8 percent of all internet stocks, briefly making him the richest person in the world. He also had an agreement to buy a third of a small online bookseller called Amazon, but he ran short of cash. Later, he bought a struggling phone company five times the size of his SoftBank, based on a vision of connected smartphones—before the iPhone existed. He also made a $20 million bet on a Chinese schoolteacher with “strong and shining eyes” and turned it into the greatest venture investment of all time: a $100 billion stake in Alibaba. His audacious $32 billion acquisition of chip designer Arm Holdings was a bet on a tomorrow of “connected and intelligent things” and is now worth almost $200 billion.
Masa’s unique brand of crazy is a canny competitive strategy. When Masa Son’s capital cannon gets behind a business, the competition frequently folds, as Uber did in China and Southeast Asia after SoftBank invested in its local competitors. Because, as Masa memorably says, in a fight between a smart guy and a crazy guy, the crazy guy always wins.
Sama also details Son’s ASI beliefs:
Ten years before the launch of ChatGPT, Masa Son would talk to me obsessively about AI and the singularity. At the time, this was a largely theoretical future event in which machine intelligence might surpass human intelligence. While Elon Musk’s Neuralink project sought a Vulcan mind-meld with machines to control them, Masa put his faith in companion humanoids with “emotional intelligence.” And while Musk seeks to colonize Mars in preparation for doomsday, Masa remains evangelical about his faith in a benign AI.
And Son is putting his money where his mouth is.
SoftBank Fulfills $40 Billion OpenAI Pledge
In March, Son’s SoftBank promised to invest $40 billion in OpenAI at a $300 billion valuation.
Despite the skepticism of Ed Zitron, SoftBank has closed the deal.
Per CNBC:
SoftBank has completed its $40 billion investment commitment to OpenAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber.
The Japanese investment giant sent over a final $22 billion to $22.5 billion last week, according to sources familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named in order to discuss details of the transaction.
SoftBank had previously invested $7.5 billion in the ChatGPT maker and syndicated another $11 billion with co-investors, the Japanese conglomerate confirmed in a press release, with the final aggregate commitment at $41 billion. The investment takes SoftBank’s stake in the company to around 11%.
CNBC reports that SoftBank had to dump other investments to come up with the cash:
Last month, SoftBank liquidated its entire $5.8 billion stake in major AI beneficiary Nvidia.
A different source familiar with the move to sell the stake told CNBC at the time that the sale, combined with other cash sources, would support its OpenAI investment.
SoftBank dumped its entire Nvidia stake for OpenAI. Someone must be a smooth talker.
Sam Altman Artificial Super Intelligence Messiah
That someone is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Here is a recent example of his patter via Politico:
I expect, though, the trajectory of the capability progress of AI to remain extremely steep. We’ve seen just in the two years or three years since ChatGPT has launched, how much more capable the models have gotten. And I see no sign of that slowing down. I think in another couple of years, it will become very plausible for AI to make, for example, scientific discoveries that humans cannot make on their own. To me, that’ll start to feel like something we could properly call superintelligence.…One of the things that I have learned continuously is, although we can say the ramp will be very steep, it’s difficult to be very precise that, you know, it’ll happen this month or this year. But I would certainly say by the end of this decade, so, by 2030, if we don’t have models that are extraordinarily capable and do things that we ourselves cannot do, I’d be very surprised.…I’ve heard many people describe many different versions of what the relationship between an AI and humanity will be. The one that has always been my favorite is: My co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, once said that he hoped that the way that an AGI would treat humanity or all AGIs would treat humanity is like a loving parent. And given the way you asked that question, it came to mind. I think it’s a particularly beautiful framing.
That said, I think when we ask that question at all, we are sort of anthropomorphizing AGI. And what this will be is a tool that is enormously capable. And even if it has no intentionality, by asking it to do something, there could be side effects, consequences we don’t understand. And so it is very important that we align it to human values. But we get to align this tool to human values and I don’t think it’ll treat humans like ants.
Well, that’s very reassuring.
In fact, if I had $40 billion I’d be sorely tempted to light it all on fire invest it all with the man Elon Musk has called Scam Altman.
Just kidding.
One SoftBank investment that Ed Zitron was correct to be skeptical about involved Sam Altman as well as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
Is Stargate Building God in the Texas Desert?
POTUS Trump kicked off 2025 with a press conference (full video) to announce a massive American AI infrastructure project, per CNN:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison appeared at the White House Tuesday afternoon alongside President Donald Trump to announce the company, which Trump called the “largest AI infrastructure project in history.”
The companies will invest $100 billion in the project to start, with plans to pour up to $500 billion into Stargate in the coming years. The project is expected to create 100,000 US jobs, Trump said.
Stargate will build “the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of AI,” including data centers around the country, Trump said. Ellison said the group’s first, 1 million-square foot data project is already under construction in Texas.
…
“I think this will be the most important project of this era,” Altman said on Tuesday. “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President.”
So far, so good.
Or Maybe Not?
By July, a report in The Wall Street Journal was pouring cold water over the deal:
A $500 billion effort unveiled at the White House to supercharge the U.S.’s artificial-intelligence ambitions has struggled to get off the ground and has sharply scaled back its near-term plans.
Six months after Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son stood shoulder to shoulder with Sam Altman and President Trump to announce the Stargate project, the newly formed company charged with making it happen has yet to complete a single deal for a data center.
Son’s SoftBank and Altman’s OpenAI, which jointly lead Stargate, have been at odds over crucial terms of the partnership, including where to build the sites, according to people familiar with the matter.
While the companies pledged at the January announcement to invest $100 billion “immediately,” the project is now setting the more modest goal of building a small data center by the end of this year, likely in Ohio, the people said.
The same WSJ piece revealed the pop culture inspiration behind Altman’s vision, or at least the branding of it:
Altman has used the Stargate name, shared with a 1994 Kurt Russell film about aliens who teleport to ancient Egypt, on projects that aren’t being financed by the partnership between OpenAI and SoftBank. The trademark to Stargate is held by SoftBank, according to public filings.
For instance, OpenAI refers to a data center in Abilene, Texas, and another it agreed in March to use in Denton, Texas, as part of Stargate even though they are being done without SoftBank, some of the people familiar with the matter said.
Let’s let Ed Zitron explain the sleight of hand behind this bait-and-switch:
I have confirmed that SoftBank never, ever had any involvement with the site in Abilene Texas. It didn’t fund it, it didn’t build it, it didn’t choose the site and, in fact, does not appear to have anything to do with any data center that OpenAI uses. The data center many, many reporters have referred to as “Stargate” has nothing to do with the “Stargate data center project.” Any reports suggesting otherwise are wrong, and I believe that this is a conscious attempt at misleading the public by OpenAI and SoftBank.…
This is an astonishing — and egregious — act of misinformation on the part of Sam Altman and OpenAI. By my count, at least 15 different stories attribute the Abilene Texas data center to the Stargate project, despite the fact that SoftBank was never and has never been involved. One would forgive anyone who got this wrong, because OpenAI itself engaged in the deliberate deception in its own announcement of the Stargate Project.…You can weasel-word all you want about how nobody has directly reported that SoftBank was or was not part of Abilene. This is a deliberate, intentional deception, perpetrated by OpenAI and SoftBank, who deliberately misled both the public and the press as a means of keeping up the appearance that SoftBank was deeply involved in (and financially obligated to) the Abilene site.
Based on reporting that existed at the time but was never drawn together, it appears that Abilene was earmarked by Microsoft for OpenAI’s use as early as July 2024, and never involved SoftBank in any way, shape or form. The “Stargate” Project, as reported, was over six months old when it was announced in January 2025, and there have been no additional sites added other than Abilene.
There’s definitely a ‘who’s zooming who’ aspect to at least the Stargate deal, but let’s circle back to the January Presidential press conference for some insight as to how Sam “Scam” Altman may have hooked Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
AI Cure for Cancer?
From the transcript of the January 21 Star Gate presser:
Sam Altman: I believe that as this technology progresses we will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate.
We will be amazed at how quickly we’re curing this cancer and that one and heart disease. And what this will do for the ability to deliver very high quality healthcare, the costs, but really to cure the diseases at a rapid, rapid rate, I think will be among the most important things this technology does.
Larry Ellison: One of the most exciting things we’re working on, again, using the tools that Sam and Masa are providing is a cancer vaccine.
It’s very interesting. It turns out, I’ll be quick, all of our cancers, cancer tumors, little fragments of those tumors float around in your blood. So you can do early cancer detection. You can do early cancer detection with a blood test. And using AI to look at the blood test you can find the cancers that are actually seriously threatening the person.
But wait, surely there’s another angle.
Larry Ellison’s Big Plans
Audrey of The Drey Dossier provides some psychological insight to the players here:
Something that’s important to know about Larry Ellison is that he is obsessed with cancer, like quite literally obsessed with it. In fact, he’s so obsessed with it that some might say that if he actually wanted to cure it, we wouldn’t still be here talking about it today.
Drey gets into a sidebar about a 1970s DIA program (that she calls a CIA program) that had been named Stargate, but then she gets back to talking about Larry Ellison, AI, and cancer.
There is no way that they’re actually looking to solve cancer. I mean, we all know this, right? And if you don’t know this, then grow up. I don’t know what to tell you because it’s a trillion dollar industry.
Trillion dollar industries are not problems for governments. Plus, if cancer were to go away, then they would lose something even more valuable than those profits.
They would lose their number one pitch for getting away with literally anything. The cancer pitch has been used for decades, wrapped in packages with all very different motives.…Bottom line is that cancer gets you in the door. Cancer gets you the regulatory exemptions Cancer gets you access to intimate data that you shouldn’t have any access to. And the cure may never come, but the data infrastructure becomes much more permanent. Okay, so if Stargate LLC isn’t about curing cancer, then what is it all about?…In 2023, Larry Ellison personally invested in a $23 million company called Imagene AI. Not using Oracle’s money, his own money. And Imagene AI was founded by, wait for it, officers of the IDF unit 8200.…They’ve been using this allegedly in Israel and Gaza. And what they do is they extract this genomic data from liquid biopsies and they analyze blood samples for fragments of DNA.…But in order to find those cancer markers, they need to have a sequence of your entire genome. And once your genomic data is digitized, then it can be stored, copied, analyzed, and sold. You know, the usual.
But that still doesn’t answer what Larry Ellison is gonna do with this genomic data once Imagene extracts it. Well, remember Oracle Health?
The company that Larry Ellison owns and controls 9.5 million patient healthcare records through the Cerner acquisition? That Oracle Health?
And those records include your medical history, your treatments, your diagnoses, all of that. And if you’ve had any genomic testing done in a hospital that uses Oracle Systems, which is most major hospitals in the United States, that genomic data is sitting in Oracle’s databases.
So now you have this theoretical structure, right, of Imagene being able to extract these fresh genomic data blood samples from you, Oracle Health storing existing genomic data from millions of patients, and now Stargate’s 10 gigawatts of AI compute infrastructure just ready to process it all.
So maybe Larry Ellison still has his feet on the ground, at least in the sense that he’s putting his hands around our collective throats.
But lest you think he’s not a dreamer, I’ll wrap with some of Ellison’s comments and claims about Artificial Super Intelligence.
Via Cloudwars:
“About 18 months ago, when we began to fully grasp what the people at OpenAI and ChatGPT had achieved — a level of artificial intelligence that would actually advance human thinking with neural networks that could answer questions that human brains would struggle with — I made a speech in which I asked, ‘Is artificial intelligence the most important discovery in the history of humankind? Maybe. And we’ll soon find out,’ ” Ellison said at the recent World Governments Summit.
“Today, 18 months later, I think it’s very, very clear: AI is a much bigger deal than the Industrial Revolution, electricity, and everything that’s come before,” Ellison said in a video conversation with former UK prime Minister Tony Blair.
“We will soon have not only artificial intelligence but also — much sooner than anticipated —artificial general intelligence and then, in the not-too-distant future, artificial super intelligence.”
“We will have incredible reasoning power, the ability to discover things that would elude the human mind because this next generation of AI is going to reason so much faster and discover insights so much faster, whether it’s being able to diagnose cancer in early stages or design therapies, custom-design vaccines for those cancers that are custom-made for your genomics and your specific tumor antigens. So in medicine, we’ll see revolutions in diagnostics and in therapeutics.
“We’ve started a project where we’re gathering satellite imagery from Kenya to California. And we can predict crop yields — so we could actually tell a farmer or an entire country whether they’re going to exceed what they expect from this year’s harvest or they’re going to have a shortfall and need to start preparing for that. We can tell individual farmers that a part of their field needs more irrigation, or part of their field needs additional fertilizer. So we can improve yields on an individual farm, and also on a much larger scale where we can improve yields across countries and even across entire regions of the world.
“I can go on and on, but AI will fundamentally change our lives in medicine, agriculture, and robotics across the board.”
And yes, this is the same Larry Ellison who is building a media empire for his nepo-baby son, David which we’ve covered previously:
