All-in-AI does not guarantee an A
He gets hold of the deer but not its horn, as the Chinese would say.
Think of Masayoshi Son, one of the world’s most prolific technology investor who built up a substantial trunk in Alibaba Group when it was not famous.
But he seemed to run out of his luck in artificial intelligence (AI), the hottest investment theme in Silicon Valley in the past year.
The Softbank founder pledged to adopt an “All-in AI” investment approach as early as the summer in 2018, sadly with just a mediocre report card so far.
Son’s Vision Fund has reportedly invested in more than 400 AI-related companies but guess what, he only had stake in one out of the 26 AI unicorns – with a valuation of US$1 billion.
What a miss! Three weeks ago, Son told his shareholders that “I’ve made many, many mistakes in my AI investments, some of them embarrassing.
“But among the many failures, there are a number of buds that will blossom very soon.”
Son’s direction was right and he has fired many shots but perfectly missed most of the best companies. What a miss!
One big miss was definitely Nvidia. The Vision Fund sold its entire stake in the chipmaker in early 2019. Nvidia went up over 10 times after and joined the trillion-dollar club in May.
Still, Softbank owns three per cent of Bytedance, which topped all private companies with a US$225 billion valuation. The minority stake helped boost Softbank’s profit in 2021.
Most of Softbank’s AI investments have yet to blossom. One example was Cybereason, an endpoint security company, which raised $100 million that valued the company at US$350 million, a 90 per cent discount from its prior funding round in July 2021.
Why a man like Son who sees the future trend but fails to capitalise on it? Well, AI covers the ability to learn, reason, generalize and infer with over 10 areas in aspects such as logical thinking, sensory recognition, automation, anthropomorphism, language analysis, neural networks, data processing and machine learning.
The talk of the universe centres on ChatGPT, a computerized large language model, which is only one small aspect of AI.
And in AI, as in other sectors such as bio-technology, there are far more lemons than oranges. Winner takes all, as always. But investors like Son only need to find one big horn. He still has time.
-- Contact us at [email protected]
-
How should leaders govern the people? Michael Chugani
A senior Mainland official once advised Donald Tsang Yam-kuen when he was the chief executive to think like the people do. It was good advice. Leaders who want to effectively serve the people need to
-
Hong Kong Tourism Board Unveils ‘Only in Hong Kong’
The Hong Kong Tourism Board (HKTB) launched ‘Only in Hong Kong’, a new global campaign that redefines how the city is experienced and differentiating Hong Kong as Asia’s World City. Moving beyond a
-
Zhang Daqian, China's Best Painter for 500 Years Mark O'Neill
At Sotheby’s art auction in Hong Kong in April this year, it put on sale three works by Zhang Daqian ( 張大千). One of them, Sunshine after Rain (雨後斜陽), sold for HK$15.36 million. It was evidence that,
-
Government celebrates success of Kai Tak Sports Park Mark O'Neill
The Hong Kong government is celebrating the success of the Kai Tak Sports Park which opened in March last year – nearly 600,000 people have attended major sports events there. In a written reply in
-
Government rewrites history of Hong Kong Mark O'Neill
The government has rewritten the history of Hong Kong, saying that it was never a colony because British rule was illegal and was never democratic and downplaying the events of 1989. “The Hong Kong
