The “AI to SI” Rebrand: What It Means for Regular Practitioners
Painless AI Lab – A Hong Kong Practitioner’s Real-World AI Journey (Part 37)
When the order landed in my feed, I checked the date. It was not April Fool’s Day.
On 29 September 2026, President Trump signed an executive order telling the U.S. federal government to stop saying “artificial intelligence” and start saying “Super Intelligence,” or SI. The stated reason is that “artificial” makes the technology sound fake or limited, while “Super Intelligence” better captures how fast it is moving and how much it might change.
Coming from hardware and IT, my first reaction was a quiet headache.
In I.T industry, SI has meant one thing for decades: system integrator. The firms that stitch hardware, networks, and software into something that actually runs. From now on, Same acronym, two jobs.
There is a deeper question underneath the branding.
Why are people so eager to drop “artificial”?
The pressure comes from the story the industry is already telling itself: narrow AI, then AGI, then ASI. Drop the word “artificial,” and the ladder looks shorter. The White House fact sheet frames it the same way. “Artificial,” it argues, implies imitation. “Super” implies capability that goes past what people could do alone.
Does dropping “artificial” mean the machine is becoming self-developing?
Not yet, the core of today’s systems is still a high-speed prediction engine. Math, statistics, and a great deal of compute. These systems can now check their own output, run multi-step workflows, call tools, and revise code with less hand-holding than they needed two years ago. That is real.
Semi-autonomous is not the same as self-developing. A model that edits a script, retries a failed step, and files the result is still executing an objective a person set, inside constraints a person built, on hardware a person pays for. It is not growing the way a person does: no body, no stake in staying alive, no open-ended drive of its own. Autonomy here is a product feature. It can be widened. It can also be switched off.
The ASI question is a different one again. Artificial superintelligence, in the technical sense, means a system that outperforms humans across essentially every cognitive domain, including the ability to improve itself faster than we can follow. We are not there.
My own read: the capability jump is real, and the name outruns it at this moment. However, “Super Intelligence” is an aspiration and probably a trajectory to build a better world。