{"id":636483,"date":"2026-10-04T22:28:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-04T22:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/636483\/"},"modified":"2026-10-04T22:28:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T22:28:14","slug":"elon-musk-fully-surrenders-to-trump-on-super-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/636483\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk Fully Surrenders to Trump on ‘Super Intelligence’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk says he\u2019s embracing the term \u201cSuper Intelligence\u201d so completely that he\u2019ll even rename one of his companies for apparent consistency. After announcing his preference for the term Super Intelligence<\/a> on X, a user asked him<\/a> about \u201crenaming to SpaceXSI.\u201d Musk replied<\/a> \u201cYes, we will make that change.\u201d<\/p>\n

This follows president Trump\u2019s executive order late last month renaming artificial intelligence<\/a> \u201cSuper Intelligence,\u201d and statements indicating he believes AI business leaders have agreed to use his preferred term<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Early on Sunday morning, Musk posted this on X:<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cNo more AI<\/p>\n

SI<\/p>\n

It\u2019s better\u201d<\/p>\n

He then self-replied<\/a> with \u201cIt always was,\u201d and posted the cover of the Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.<\/p>\n

Maybe he\u2019s right in a way. Perhaps \u201csuperintelligence\u201d\u2014one word\u2014was always a catchier marketing term.<\/p>\n

\u201cArtificial intelligence\u201d was an observation from about 1956<\/a> of attributes\u2014both real and hypothetical\u2014in computer systems that gave them what one group of researchers thought was the potential to simulate every aspect of intelligence. Over the decades, artificial intelligence has become an evocative term in sci-fi<\/a>, an area of scientific inquiry, and a marketing term used by, for instance, Zojirushi<\/a> to describe a flexible form of rice cooker automation.<\/p>\n

While that lexical evolution was underway, techniques like deep learning, and architectures like transformers and LLMs slowly caused the concept of AI as understood by computer scientists to morph into a specific set of tools. Today, practically speaking, someone knows what\u2019s meant by AI when they, say, go to buy some of it: usually model-based, generative, token-based software.<\/p>\n

Superintelligence, however, is a loosely related term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary<\/a>, it can mean many forms of superior intelligence, but it primarily means God\u2019s plan, or something like a mysterious underlying order to the universe. The first ever use of the word, from an author named R.H. Black reads, \u201cProvidence expresses the particular act of providing..[and] is applied to the Divine Superintelligence.\u201d You have to admit Musk is arguably right: the mysterious power of God has way more juice than a term that has come to mean tokens and LLMs.<\/p>\n

Bostrom\u2019s book is more or less about the overlap of AI and superintelligence\u2014a hypothetical point at which computer-based \u201cintelligence\u201d outclasses humanity, and how that could have upsides and downsides. He includes helpful thought experiments that have been absorbed by many overzealous readers as prophecies of doom, which, I\u2019ve learned from experience<\/a>, is something that often happens when authors speculate.<\/p>\n

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have been using the compound word version of the term \u201csuperintelligence\u201d in recent years, largely to describe an aspiration. In his essay from last year<\/a>, \u201cPersonal Superintelligence,\u201d Zuckerberg wrote, \u201cThe rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s own explanation<\/a> for his use of the two-word phrase \u201cSuper Intelligence\u201d has little to do with marking a major milestone in AI research. His executive order<\/a> does hint at that milestone without much fanfare, dubiously claiming it can do \u201cmuch more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence.\u201d But off-the-cuff, Trump clearly contradicts this, expressing dislike of the negative connotations of the word \u201cartificial,\u201d and saying, \u201cIt\u2019s a terrible word. It\u2019s amazing it lived on so long actually.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I wrote before, the business leaders who attended Trump\u2019s AI business summit last week are slowly coming to terms with what they signed up for<\/a>. I\u2019m not alone in noticing that these businessmen are cornered, and probably a little embarrassed. Writing in Wired, Steven Levy described the debacle<\/a> as a bunch of CEOs and company presidents\u2014leaders from Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Google\u2014humiliating themselves in order to pass a Donald Trump loyalty test. \u201cMy bet is that they will do the minimum to avoid presidential ire while trying to run out the clock until the next administration puts this bizarre idea out of its misery,\u201d Levy wrote.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not at all clear how much\u2014if at all\u2014Trump is pressuring these business leaders via back channels to dig deeper \u201cSuper Intelligence\u201d holes for themselves. Musk and Zuckerberg are clearly fond of the word \u201csuperintelligence,\u201d but if they start throwing around that term with serious people in the room, they\u2019ll need to clarify what they mean\u2014whether they\u2019ve decided current AI models are \u201csuperintelligent,\u201d or whether they\u2019re participating in Trump\u2019s branding exercise. If it\u2019s the latter, are they going to use the two-word and compound-word versions interchangeably? If so, are they going to invent their own new term for the hypothetical technology currently called \u201csuperintelligence?\u201d<\/p>\n

Then again, SpaceXAI parent company SpaceX already renamed SpaceXAI once this year<\/a>\u2014it used to be called xAI. And Musk famously fails to deliver on things he says will happen<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk says he\u2019s embracing the term \u201cSuper Intelligence\u201d so completely that he\u2019ll even rename one of his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,350,85,46,67816,125,627],"class_list":["post-636483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-elon-musk","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-superintelligence","tag-technology","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}