Trump wants to rename artificial intelligence to superintelligence

During his second term, Donald Trump has become obsessed with renaming things. The Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America, he now calls Lake Ontario Lake America and recently he thought about renaming the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of Trump.

But this slightly megalomaniacal spate of name changes does not stop at geographical locations. As you know, the Department of Defense became the Department of War, and now the 47th President of the United States wants to scrap the concept of artificial intelligence.

The unexpected development came a little more than two-thirds into a long speech before the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. As easily and casually as he always does, Donald Trump switched the topic from illegal immigration to AI, declaiming that we have entered a new era.

- Welcome to the world of superintelligence, as the president summed it up.

He explains from the podium that the word artificial makes AI sound "fake", when in fact the technology is "fantastic" - and we simply cannot have it that way.

- From this point forward, all documents in the US, and hopefully the world, will use the much more accurate term super instead of artificial. It's super intelligence, Trump explained, leaning heavily on the lectern.

Then he good-naturedly declared that the existential threat posed by AI, sorry SI, is overstated, but that the technology will bring about a bigger change than the Industrial Revolution – and he reiterated his opposition to the restrictions on AI development proposed by Open AI, Anthrophic and Space X AI.

"We're only going to encourage superintelligence, we're not going to rein it in," Donald Trump said, adding that the Justice Department will keep an eye on AI companies to make sure they behave.

It's a rejection that stings a little more when it's precisely the fear of superintelligence that keeps AI leaders Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk up at night. Although maybe not quite Trump's super intelligence.

What makes the president's new offer so confusing is that superintelligence is a very established concept in the AI ​​sector. It is usually described as an AI whose intelligence in every way far exceeds that of humans, and it is such an almost omnipotent creation that the tech elite fears.

Say what you will about Claude, ChatGPT and Grok. The very sharpest AI models were described as science fiction ten years ago, and progress is currently very fast, but they are as little omnipotent as a calculator.

Today's language models still lack the versatility and learning ability required to even achieve human intelligence, they are nowhere near touching us yet. And what it takes to far exceed our intelligence, we don't even know that.

Renaming artificial intelligence to superintelligence does not change this, any more than the Mexican, sorry American, golf has begun to sparkle in the colors of the American star-spangled banner. In that case, on the other hand, tech giants like Apple and Google were quick to change golf's name in their map apps - we'll see if they'll cave in the same way and start foisting Trump-approved SI on us instead of fake-sounding AI.