SoftBank Group Corp. on Tuesday posted a net profit of 2.92 trillion yen ($18.97 billion) for the first fiscal half, a record for any Japanese firm on a six-month basis, boosted by gains from its investment in OpenAI, the developer of chatbot ChatGPT. The profit for the April-September period nearly tripled the 1.01 trillion yen from the same period a year earlier, as the investment and technology group increasingly counts on the growth potential of artificial intelligence. Revenue was up 7.7 percent at 3.74 trillion yen.