Elon Musk says he embraces the term “Super Intelligence” so completely that he will even rename one of his companies for apparent consistency. After announcing his preference for the term Super Intelligence over X, a user asked him to “rename it SpaceXSI.” Musk replied: “Yes, we will make this change. »
This follows President Trump’s executive order late last month renaming artificial intelligence “Super Intelligence,” and statements that he believes AI industry leaders have agreed to use his preferred term.
Early Sunday morning, Musk posted this to X:
“More AI
IF
It’s better »
He then replied, “It always has been,” and posted the cover of Nick Bostrom’s book. Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies.
Maybe he’s right in a way. Perhaps “superintelligence” – a word – has always been a catchier marketing term.
“Artificial intelligence” was a roughly 1956 observation of attributes – both real and hypothetical – of computer systems that gave them what a group of researchers thought was the potential to simulate all aspects of intelligence. Over the decades, artificial intelligence has become an evocative term in science fiction, an area of scientific research, and a marketing term used, for example, by Zojirushi to describe a flexible form of rice cooker automation.
While this lexical evolution was underway, techniques such as deep learning and architectures such as Transformers and LLMs slowly caused the concept of AI as understood by computer scientists to morph into a specific set of tools. Today, in practice, someone knows what is meant by AI when they go, for example, to buy a piece of it: usually model-based, generative, token-based software.
Superintelligence, however, is a loosely related term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can refer to many forms of higher intelligence, but it primarily means God’s plan, or something like a mysterious order underlying the universe. The very first use of the word, by an author named RH Black, reads: “Providence expresses the particular act of providing… (and) is applied to Divine Superintelligence. You have to admit that Musk is probably right: the mysterious power of God has a lot more juice than a term that now refers to tokens and LLMs.
Bostrom’s book is more or less about the overlap of AI and superintelligence – a hypothetical point at which computer “intelligence” outperforms humanity, and how that might have advantages and disadvantages. He includes useful thought experiments that have been absorbed by many overzealous readers as doomsday prophecies, which, I have learned from experience, is something that often happens when authors speculate.
Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have used the compound version of the term “superintelligence” in recent years, largely to describe an aspiration. In his essay last year, “Personal Superintelligence,” Zuckerberg wrote: “The remainder of this decade likely appears to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take and whether superintelligence will be a tool of personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swathes of society.” »
Trump’s explanation for his use of the phrase “Super Intelligence” has little to do with marking a major milestone in AI research. His decree hints at this step without much fanfare, dubiously asserting that it can do “much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence.” But Trump clearly contradicts this, expressing his dislike of the negative connotations of the word “artificial” and saying: “It’s a terrible word.” It’s amazing that he survived this long actually. »
As I’ve written before, the business leaders who attended Trump’s AI business summit last week are slowly coming to terms with what they signed up for. I’m not the only one to notice that these businessmen are cornered, and probably a little embarrassed. In Wired, Steven Levy described the debacle as that of a group of CEOs and company presidents – executives from Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia and Google – humiliating themselves in order to pass a test of loyalty to Donald Trump. “I bet they will do the minimum to avoid presidential wrath while trying to pass the time until the next administration puts this bizarre idea out of its misery,” Levy wrote.
It is not at all clear to what extent – if at all – Trump is pressuring these business leaders through back channels to dig deeper holes in “Super Intelligence” for themselves. Musk and Zuckerberg are clearly fond of the word “superintelligence,” but if they start using the term in front of serious people in the room, they’ll need to clarify what they mean — whether they’ve decided that current AI models are “superintelligent” or whether they’re participating in Trump’s branding exercise. If it’s the latter, will they use the two-word and compound-word versions interchangeably? If so, will they invent their own new term for the hypothetical technology currently called “superintelligence”?
Then again, SpaceXAI’s parent company, SpaceX, has already renamed SpaceXAI once this year – it was previously called xAI. And Musk is notoriously incapable of making things happen that he thinks will happen.
Gn bussni
