Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

SoftBank + OpenAI Bet Big on ‘Cristal Intelligence

SoftBank + OpenAI Bet Big on ‘Cristal Intelligence

SoftBank + OpenAI Bet Big on ‘Cristal Intelligence

Feb 4, 2025

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4

min read

Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AJ Green Founder, CEO of AI Advantage Agency AI Expert,

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Good morning, AI entrepreneurs & enthusiasts,

SoftBank has just committed a staggering $3 billion annually to OpenAI while unveiling ‘Cristal Intelligence’—a joint venture focused on delivering customized AI tools exclusively to Japanese businesses.

With Stargate’s $500 billion data center initiative and now Cristal Intelligence, are we witnessing Japan’s major push in the global AI race?

In today’s AI news:


  • SoftBank and OpenAI announce 'Cristal Intelligence'

  • Anthropic challenges hackers to break its AI

  • EU invests $56M to build open-source AI rival

  • Top Tools & Quick News


SoftBank and OpenAI announce 'Cristal Intelligence'

The News: SoftBank just announced a $3 billion annual commitment to OpenAI's technology while launching ‘Cristal Intelligence,’ a joint venture to bring customized OpenAI tools exclusively to Japanese businesses.

The details:


  • SoftBank plans to spend $3B annually across its subsidiaries, including Arm and PayPay, on OpenAI technology.

  • Cristal Intelligence will feature a specialized ChatGPT business version and OpenAI’s API, restricted to Japan.

  • The initiative aims to provide secure, customized enterprise AI solutions, potentially rivalling traditional consulting firms.

  • This partnership follows SoftBank's involvement in "Stargate," a $500B data center initiative with OpenAI and Oracle.


Why it matters: This massive investment ($3B per YEAR) signals Japan's serious push into the global AI race through SoftBank's growing alliance with OpenAI. With their recent Stargate partnership and now Cristal Intelligence, SoftBank is going all in on building the infrastructure to dominate AI deployment across Asia.

Anthropic challenges hackers to break its AI.

The News: Anthropic just unveiled Constitutional Classifiers, a new AI safety system with promising results, and is inviting the public to help stress-test it after surviving over 3,000 hours of unsuccessful bug bounty attempts.

The details:


  • The system uses AI-generated training data in various languages and writing styles to block diverse jailbreak attempts.

  • In tests against 10,000 advanced jailbreak attempts, it successfully blocked 95.6%—compared to just 14% for unprotected Claude.

  • 183 bug bounty participants spent 3,000+ hours attempting to break it for a $15,000 prize—none fully succeeded.

  • Anthropic is inviting the public to test the system until February 10.


Why it matters: As AI becomes more powerful, ensuring it remains secure and unexploitable is crucial. Anthropic’s approach—using AI to catch jailbreaks—is a fresh take on AI safety, and making the system open for public testing reinforces their commitment to transparency.

EU invests $56M to build open-source AI rival

The News: The European Union has announced a $56M investment to develop OpenEuroLLM, a new open-source large language model that works with all 30 European languages.

The details:


  • While $56M is tiny compared to OpenAI's reported $40B raise, it's 10x what DeepSeek claimed to have spent on their breakthrough model.

  • The initiative will leverage EU supercomputers like Spain’s Mare Nostrum and Italy’s Leonardo.

  • The EU plans to make its models, software, and data fully open-source, tailored for industries like healthcare and finance.

  • The goal is to provide a transparent, values-driven AI alternative that European businesses and governments can build upon.


Why it matters: After years of focusing on regulation, the EU is finally stepping into the AI development race (sort of). While $56M is a fraction of what industry giants are investing, their focus on specialized, industry-specific AI could yield significant results—especially following DeepSeek’s recent success with low-cost, open-source models.

Today's Top AI Tools


  • OpenAI Deep Research - A new ChatGPT Pro plan feature that does extensive web research and delivers detailed reports with citations

  • Geospy AI - Finds the location from any photo by analyzing its pixels

  • Tana - An AI-native workspace that turns notes into work tasks

  • Open Deep Research - An open-source alternative to Gemini and OpenAI Deep Research


Quick News

ARC Prize found OpenAI’s new o3-mini AI model to patch o1 on its ARC-AGI-1 Semi-Private Test Set while being 100x less the cost.

Meta published its Frontier AI Framework, emphasizing its commitment to open-source development while focusing on mitigating cybersecurity and weapon risks.

The Beatles won a Grammy for Best Rock Performance with "Now and Then," an AI-enhanced song that used noise reduction to clean up an old Lennon demo.

OpenAI expanded ChatGPT's WhatsApp integration globally, adding image uploads and voice message support simply by texting 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478).

UK researchers developed self-healing asphalt using biomass waste and Google Cloud's AI, potentially solving the country's ‘pothole crisis’.

Microsoft is forming a new unit called the Advanced Planning Unit (APU) within its AI division to study AI's implications for society, health, and work.

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