The U.S. government will start referring to all artificial intelligence systems as “super intelligence,” President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday - although the two terms are not synonymous.
"The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control for AI being spoken of so much now - hereinafter officially called 'super intelligence,'" the president said in his speech.
He added that all U.S. government documents, and he hopes the rest of the world, will now refer to AI as “super intelligence.” He said the word artificial "makes intelligence sound fake" and believes "super" is more accurate.
Trump noted that he doesn't know whether the term will catch on. ISMG reached out to several AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, to ask whether they’ll brand themselves with Trump approved terminology, but didn’t hear back by deadline.
Superintelligence, sometimes referred to as artificial superintelligence, already exists as a term in the world of AI. It refers to the idea that machines will eventually surpass human intelligence in all aspects of life. Most frontier AI labs have been talking about AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which is when AI systems match human intelligence and can adapt to situations without retraining them from scratch.
Several companies have embraced the term, even before today’s Trump speech. Former OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever's company right after leaving OpenAI is called Safe Superintelligence. Meta named its AI lab, led by chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, Superintelligence Labs.
It's unclear whether the federal government wants to push for superintelligence in its most commonly understood sense.
The Trump administration has shown more friendliness towards the AI industry. It released an executive order in June for voluntary safety evaluations of AI models but has been criticized for keeping the details largely secret. The president, who clashed with AI regulation proponents including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, said on Sept. 14 that the only control or guardrail AI needs is "a strong and smart president."
The night before the UN speech, Trump took to Truth Social, seemingly workshopping the new term for AI. He asked if the rebranded technology should be called extreme, superior or super.
Industry observers, at least on social media, did not seem to take the president's comments seriously. Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, said in an X post, "Your intelligence is fake. It's artificial. Mine? It's super. Super Intelligence. Aka SI."
Source: Bank Info Security
--Agencies
