US President Donald Trump has issued an executive order, titled "Inaugurating The Era of Super Intelligence," officially replacing the term "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) with "Super Intelligence" (SI) across all executive branch operations. This directive follows a high-level luncheon with prominent tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.
The announcement comes days after President Trump first proposed the terminology change during his address to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Addressing reporters, Trump stated that the name change was spearheaded by "the biggest, smartest, and greatest people anywhere in the world." He emphasized the technology's profound impact, declaring it "much bigger than the Internet" and even "bigger than the industrial revolution, far bigger than the internet, not even close."
Why the Change to Super Intelligence?
President Trump articulated his reasoning, stating, "Artificial Intelligence is like fake news. Fake news is one of my great terms, but now I'm going to call them (media) artificial news..." He believes the new term, Super Intelligence, more accurately reflects the "transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people."
The executive order directs federal departments and agencies to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in all official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, and policy documents. It explicitly states that the executive branch "will not acknowledge the usage of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' in any applicable setting" to the maximum extent permitted by law.
Defining Super Intelligence in the Order
For the purposes of the executive order, "Super Intelligence" and "SI" are defined to encompass "the technologies and systems encompassed by the term 'artificial intelligence' as defined in section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code."
Section 9401(3) of title 15, United States Code, defines artificial intelligence as a machine-based system that can make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments for a given set of human-defined objectives. These systems utilize machine- and human-based inputs for perception (observing and taking in data from real or virtual environments), abstraction (automatically analyzing those perceptions to build analytical models), and inference (utilizing the generated models to formulate options, recommendations or actions).
The order also mandates the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST) to propose legislative language for a federal definition of "Super Intelligence" and "SI." This proposal will assess whether and how the new definition should modify or supersede the existing statutory definition of AI and recommend necessary amendments for its implementation across the executive branch.
The Broader Concept of Super Intelligence
Within the field of AI, "Super Intelligence" typically refers to a theoretical stage where machines possess cognitive capabilities and intellect that surpass human understanding across all domains. This concept is considered the ultimate phase in AI development, following Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), which comprises today's specialized systems, and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which denotes human-equivalent AI.