At a critical moment when the artificial intelligence competition is entering deeper waters, SoftBank Group has once again made a bold capital move to bet on the future. Recently, the SoftBank board officially approved an additional $22.5 billion (approximately 16 billion yuan) investment in OpenAI, increasing its total investment in this AI giant to $32.5 billion. As the main driver of OpenAI's current $40 billion super financing plan, SoftBank alone bears 75% of the funding, not only demonstrating its firm belief in the long-term value of general artificial intelligence, but also paving the way for OpenAI's IPO.
This huge amount of money will be mainly used to accelerate model training, self-developed AI chips and data center infrastructure construction, while supporting OpenAI's cutting-edge exploration in the field of multi-modal. Among them, AI music generation has become a new strategic focus.
According to the latest information, OpenAI has already partnered with a top American music conservatory to systematically annotate sheet music data, building a high-quality dataset for training the next generation of high-fidelity music generation models. Although AI-generated music still lags behind human creations in terms of emotional expression and structural complexity, and faces legal challenges such as copyright and originality, OpenAI clearly sees music as another key generative dimension after text, images, and videos.
At the same time, OpenAI's product implementation pace is also accelerating significantly. The recently launched AI browser deeply embeds ChatGPT into the entire web browsing process, allowing users to get real-time summaries, translations, and content generation assistance, marking that AI is evolving from a "question-answering tool" into an "operating system-level assistant." These actions indicate that OpenAI is fully shifting from technology research and development to commercialization and ecosystem building.
SoftBank's continued heavy investment is not only an acknowledgment of OpenAI's technical roadmap, but also a grand layout for the AI infrastructure and content ecosystem over the next decade. When capital, computing power, and creativity converge in areas such as music, browsers, and more unknown fields, OpenAI may be standing at the threshold of transforming from an "intelligent engine" into a "co-creator of digital civilization." And this new chapter ignited by $22.5 billion has just begun.
