Donald Trump has a new name for AI, and it's not catchy.
Speaking to the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, Trump argued that the word 'artificial' makes the technology sound fake. His fix: US government documents will now refer to AI as 'super intelligence' instead. It's a naming change, not a technical one. The underlying systems don't work any differently.
Names shape how people think about risk. 'Artificial intelligence' has always carried a whiff of the fake; 'super intelligence' borrows a term AI researchers use for hypothetical systems that outstrip human cognition entirely. That label doesn't change what today's chatbots and image generators can do - it just changes the rhetoric a government uses to describe them.
It's the kind of rebrand that reads better in a press release than in a peer-reviewed paper.