Speaking at the SoftBank World corporate conference, Son said he believes AGI will be ten times more intelligent than the sum total of all human intelligence. He noted the rapid progress in generative AI that he said has already exceeded human intelligence in certain areas.

"It is wrong to say that AI cannot be smarter than humans as it is created by humans. AI is now self learning, self training, and self inferencing, just like human beings."

Son has spoken of the potential of AGI - typically using the term "singularity" - to transform business and society for some years, but this is the first time he has given a timeline for its development.

He also introduced the idea of "Artificial Super Intelligence" at the conference which he claimed would be realised in 20 years and would surpass human intelligence by a factor of 10,000.