Photo/Illutration SoftBank Group Corp. Chairman and President Masayoshi Son speaks at an event jointly held with OpenAI in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward on Feb. 3. (Wataru Sekita)

SoftBank Group Corp. announced on Feb. 3 that it has established a joint venture with U.S.-based OpenAI to provide artificial intelligence services for businesses in Japan.

The name of the new company is “SB OpenAI Japan,” and the service is called “Cristal Intelligence.”

It is a 50-50 joint venture between OpenAI and an intermediary holding company funded by SoftBank Group and SoftBank Corp.

SoftBank Group will pay 450 billion yen ($2.9 billion) a year to OpenAI for the use of Cristal Intelligence.

SB OpenAI Japan will deploy 1,000 personnel to conduct sales activities and introduce the service to domestic companies.

Under the plan, SB OpenAI Japan will create an AI model for each client company to incorporate internal data and provide “AI agents” that will work in place of humans in customer service and sales activities.

SoftBank Group and OpenAI have agreed to first introduce Cristal Intelligence to companies under SoftBank Group.

At a briefing for potential corporate customers on Feb. 3, Masayoshi Son, chairman and president of Softbank Group, said artificial general intelligence (AGI) with human-like intelligence will be realized in the near future.

“AGI will start with companies, especially large companies,” Son said.

About 500 companies attended the briefing.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also took the stage and demonstrated the AI agent.

OpenAI on the same day announced “Deep Research,” a new feature that examines large amounts of texts, images, PDFs, among other things on the internet for deep analysis.

(This article was written by Shinji Muramatsu and Naoko Murai.)

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