Insiders at SoftBank Worry Their CEO Is Getting Conned by Sam Altman

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The rise of AI is many things: technological, sociological, political, even teleological.

But perhaps above all, it’s financial. When OpenAI released ChatGPT back in late 2022, it quick picked up enormous user traction — and moneymen across the tech industry immediately started scheming about how to cash in from the rush of interest.

The model they coalesced around hinges on gigantic investments in computing infrastructure to power the tech. It’s high risk and high reward: in their telling, the investments will pay off massively as the tech matures to automate huge swathes of the labor market, but some critics fear it’ll never generate enough revenue to justify the incredible spending.

Nobody is more exposed than the Japanese investment company SoftBank, which has poured an eye-watering $60 billion into OpenAI over the past few years.

According to explosive new reporting by Bloomberg, even certain insiders at the company are rattled. Viziers of founder Masayoshi Son have privately questioned what will happen if the Sam Altman-led company can’t pull off its grand promises — and Son’s reaction has apparently been so “brusque,” in the publication’s wording, that they eventually gave up.

What’s clear from the reporting is that Altman has done what he does best: turned Son into a true believer in his vision of computer superintelligence that causes profound shifts for the entire course of civilization.

Habib Imam, a former SoftBank insider who’s now at Menlo Park Capital, told Bloomberg that it’s fundamentally a “bet on a worldview about AGI,” adding that “you can’t hedge a worldview.”

The reality is that Son’s track record is dodgy. He made a series of canny bets during the company’s early history, then bet big on the Chinese retailer Alibaba, netting…

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