SIgh
As if coaxing Big Tech companies to pay for your inauguration or new ballrooms or forcing executives to come to the movie premieres of documentaries about your wife wasn't enough, we now have a new, more direct litmus test of fealty to President Trump. "Super Intelligence".
If you use the term in your talking points going forward, you're good. If you don't, well, you're "THE ENEMY!" It's a signal and it's that simple.
Of course, it's not actually that simple. The reality is that these various players in Big Tech have little choice but to play along with the latest ridiculous game of charades. Because if they don't, they'll be in the dog house. More importantly, their companies – the biggest companies in the world – will be in the dog house. This could hurt not only their business prospects going forward, but their shareholders.
Look no further than Tim Cook to see how this works. Even after years of cultivating his relationship with Trump – going above and beyond to secure a good relationship even during his first administration – all "Tim Apple" had to do was skip out on one requested ride-along on a trip overseas for the President to show off his tech trophies and boom, dog house. Soon, "I had a little problem with Tim Cook" turned into a golden gift presented by Cook to Trump in the Oval Office with the cameras on for the world to see the rather pathetic show of fealty.
And so when it came time for the Melania movie screening, who was there with two thumbs way up? All smiles as people are literally dying in the streets.
So yeah, "Super Intelligence" it will be. Signing the 'SI' accord (around the executive order) on responsibility was one thing (and not legally binding for private companies), but clearly what the President actually wants to see is your usage of his new term in public. In interviews, in blog posts, in product announcements. The more overt the better.
To that end, Marc Benioff is the current leader in the "SI" clubhouse, in not only using the term, but reorienting his product branding around it. 'AIforce' is now 'SIforce' – ridiculous AI-generated, sorry SI-generated, logo and all. Granted, Salesforce has always been pretty bad at branding, so this is sort of par for that particular course. But again, the key is the overt signaling.
Meanwhile, Trump's on-again/off-again paid pal, Elon Musk, is fully on board with "SI" noting that "it's better" – which might be true if he were referring to 'Sports Illustrated', which anyone over 40 probably associates with the two letters, but of course this was just a public show of support to the President, right before he received his own golden trinket, no less. Is 'SpaceXAI' now actually 'SpaceXSI'? Perhaps if only so Elon can make some sort of 'SXSI' joke?
Jeff Bezos obviously doesn't even run Amazon anymore, but it doesn't matter. He's on board with 'SI', telling Fox News (the President's channel of choice, obviously) that "I do like SI." I mean, what's not to like? Except everything about it, that is.
And now we have our first blog post, from Microsoft's Satya Nadella, wrapping his latest self-serving proposal about the need for AI protection to be stripped from the frontier model makers – something which Microsoft would be happy to handle and believes they're uniquely suited to, naturally – with multiple callouts to "Super Intelligence". The phrase gets four mentions, including in the title, in a 500-word post. No "AI" to be found anywhere.
But no one seems more bought in than NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, who after years of all "AI" all the time, may never utter the phrase again. At least not in public. At least not until the end of President Trump's term.
That's the thing, while all of this just looks like rather silly signs of fealty at the moment, it will all likely just look plain silly in hindsight. We might be using "Super Intelligence" in 2030, but only because many were using it before all of this. But it won't be as a replacement to "Artificial Intelligence". Because it shouldn't be a replacement to "AI", it should indicate something beyond human levels of intelligence as you'd expect "super" to imply.
This was, of course, the original meaning of the phrase before the President, yes, superseded it. I mean, at the end of the day, it's all just branding but "Artificial Intelligence" made some sense – dating back decades, of course – as man-made intelligence. But now that the branding has slowly been poisoned by various Big Tech and Big AI talking points and initiatives, Trump is trying to "change the conversation". But this isn't Men in Black where the memory of AI is just zapped away. It's far too integrated into the nomenclature at this point to be erased.
So instead the signaling will just work the other way: anyone using "Super Intelligence" will be deemed to be a Trump loyalist. And while I would say that "AI" will become a sort of rallying cry of the opposition, again, it's just too integrated and commonplace for that to be the case. People will just continue to use it because it's the normal, non-politicized way to speak about the technology.
Meanwhile, "Super Intelligence" will shift into a punchline. This reworking and rewording has now made the term "super" sound juvenile. Like we're about to see "Super Duper Intelligence" announced as the next big breakthrough.1
That's too bad for folks like Meta which were using the term previously. But again, they were using it to indicate something greater than AI; the next step, perhaps even 'AGI' to some, but not a replacement for the 'AI' blanket term.
Now it will be just that, at least for some, at least for a little while. I still suspect that tech will start to turn on Trump at some point as he creeps further into lame duck territory – it may already be starting. And the early acts of "rebellion" may be in going back to using "AI".
For now, it's a race for who can lick the most boots before one inevitably stomps them.
It will be interesting to see what Apple does next. Presumably Trump would have made Cook rename 'Siri AI' to 'Siri SI'. But Cook is no longer CEO, that's now John Ternus' call. What will he do? My guess is try to ride out the storm without changing the name – after all 'AI' stands for 'Apple Intelligence' and nothing else, right? – but that might not be tenable given how high-profile Apple is!
The bigger elephant in this room is OpenAI itself. Sam Altman has also gone out of his way to maintain a good relationship with the President. Is he willing to show the ultimate sign of fealty in changing his company's name to 'OpenSI'? Sure, "no plans to do that" right now, but if "SI" fails to get the take up Trump is hoping for, he will be applying pressure... Trademark lawyers are salivating as we speak.
Maybe they're just hungry. Freedom fries, anyone?
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 The jokes write themselves, months/years in advance folks. ↩