SoftBank's Masayoshi Son says superintelligence in the wrong hands could be "super dangerous" - The Next Web

Masayoshi Son has been to Kyoto and come back with a warning: superintelligence in the wrong hands could be "super dangerous." Super dangerous — not merely dangerous, super. That's the vocabulary of a man who has never met a prefix he couldn't escalate, and it sits beautifully beside the other number The Next Web hands us: $64.6bn deployed into OpenAI. It is a remarkable thing to fund a technology at that scale and simultaneously describe its arrival as a threat, but there is no contradiction here, only a portfolio. The wrong hands, in every version of this speech, are always somebody else's; the $64.6bn is very much his.

He appears beside Michael Kratsios, who launched a 17-country declaration endorsed by Germany, Italy, Poland, Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus and the UK. Seventeen signatories is a genuinely large number, and it would be churlish to note that a signature is the cheapest commodity in diplomacy — so here's the other number instead: $64.6bn. One of these is a declaration; the other is a position. Kyoto is a lovely venue for a multilateral promise, too, given the city's prior experience of agreements that history later treated as a suggestion. Still, seventeen countries agreeing to care about superintelligence is seventeen more than the null hypothesis.

Not long ago the Treasury Secretary compared safety-warning CEOs to Hannibal Lecter, which was a fun week for everyone involved. Son now joins that particular menu: a man who calls bubble talk absurd while warning that the thing he is funding at scale might yet end up in the wrong hands. The honest version of the speech is shorter — superintelligence is coming, I have positioned accordingly, please regulate the other chap. Kyoto gets a declaration, OpenAI gets $64.6bn, and the rest of us get a headline containing the word "super". The danger is noted, the cheques clear, and the paperwork gets laminated.