Trump is going to change the name of the AI, Musk: It's going to be smart enough that we don't understand it.
Trump is going to change the name of the AI, Musk: It's going to be smart enough that we don't understand it.
[TechWeb] September 20, local time on September 19, US President Donald Trump launched a vote on the Truth Social platform to publicly solicit public opinion on whether "artificial intelligence" (artificial intelligence) should be renamed.
In his post, Trump bluntly stated that many people believe that the word “artificial intelligence” is “inaccurate and very ungainly relative to AI.” His alternatives include Superior Intelligence (SI), Extreme Intelligence (EI), and Supreme Intelligence (SI). Trump called the new names “a more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomenon.”
Voting quickly attracted attention. As of about nine hours after posting, more than 156,000 people had voted, with Superior Intelligence temporarily leading with 41% of the vote. At the end of the post, Trump appealed to his supporters: “This is a vote, and I would appreciate it if everyone could vote! Which is the best name for this growing ‘revolution’?”
In fact, Trump's dissatisfaction with the name “artificial intelligence” is not a whim. “The word ‘artificial‘ is terrible - I can't stand it,” he said back in October 2025 at the Artificial Intelligence Summit in Washington, D.C. This is the first time he has publicly put the idea into action.
Musk responds: It's going to be smart enough that we don't understand it
Hours later, Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded under Trump's post. Instead of choosing between the three options like other netizens, he wrote a sentence: “It will be so smart that we can't understand it.”
The response was concise and meaningful. Instead of directly commenting on Trump's proposed naming scheme, Musk took the discussion to a deeper level - AI's capabilities could be far beyond human comprehension, no matter how humans name them.
It is noteworthy that Musk and Trump have a delicate disagreement on the stance of AI development. Trump continued his consistent stance in the post, calling concerns about AI risks a “hoax” and claiming that AI “the only control or ‘guardrail‘ it needs is a strong and smart president.” Musk has previously joined with tech leaders like Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodey of Anthropic in backing calls to slow AI development. However, there seems to be consensus on the judgement that AI will drive economic growth.
Musk on the Economic Impact of AI: Doubling GDP Growth
Just a day before launching the name change vote, Musk also published a forecast on the X platform on the impact of AI on the US economy. “My guess is that AI will roughly double the US GDP growth rate next year, from 2% to around 4%, perhaps even higher,” he wrote.
This prediction is in stark contrast to the judgment of the current mainstream economic institutions. Morningstar expects the U.S. economy to slow in 2027, with Apollo Global Management chief economist Thorsten Slock estimating that U.S. AI-related capital spending could reach about 3 percent of GDP per year between 2027 and 2029, up significantly from 0.6 percent three years ago. Moody's expects U.S. technology companies to spend nearly $1 trillion on chips and data centers in 2027.
However, historical experience has shown that there is often a lag in the conversion of investment into productivity gains, which took years to translate into productivity growth within the economy during the 1990s internet wave. The Fed raised its benchmark rate to 4.00% on Sept. 16, and Goldman Sachs expects another rate hike in October, adding further uncertainty to the economic outlook.
Whether or not “artificial intelligence” will eventually be renamed “superior intelligence”, this discussion, in which Trump and Musk participate together, has put a fundamental question before the public: When we name a technology, are we describing it or defining our relationship with it?