Elon Musk says he’s embracing the term “Super Intelligence” so completely that he’ll even rename one of his companies for apparent consistency. After announcing his preference for the term Super Intelligence on X, a user asked him about “renaming to SpaceXSI.” Musk replied “Yes, we will make that change.”

This follows president Trump’s executive order late last month renaming artificial intelligence “Super Intelligence,” and statements indicating he believes AI business leaders have agreed to use his preferred term.

He then self-replied with “It always was,” and posted the cover of the Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

Maybe he’s right in a way. Perhaps “superintelligence”—one word—was always a catchier marketing term.

“Artificial intelligence” was an observation from about 1956 of attributes—both real and hypothetical—in computer systems that gave them what one group of researchers thought was the potential to simulate every aspect of intelligence. Over the decades, artificial intelligence has become an evocative term in sci-fi, an area of scientific inquiry, and a marketing term used by, for instance, Zojirushi to describe a flexible form of rice cooker automation.

While that lexical evolution was underway, techniques like deep learning, and architectures like transformers and LLMs slowly caused the concept of AI as understood by computer scientists to morph into a specific set of tools. Today, practically speaking, someone knows what’s meant by AI when they, say, go to buy some of it: usually model-based, generative, token-based software.

Superintelligence, however, is a loosely related term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , it can mean many forms of superior intelligence, but it primarily means God’s plan, or something like a mysterious underlying order to the universe.

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