For President Donald Trump, the name "AI" is DOA.
Trump said that the United States would change the name of artificial intelligence at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. It will now be called "superintelligence," Trump said.
"The use of the word 'artificial' makes intelligence fake," Trump said. "It is not fake. It's actually amazing."
The name "artificial intelligence" isn't a legally designated term that can be changed by the president. Rather, it's a commonly agreed-upon term that companies and consumers alike use to describe the product.
The term dates back to a 1955 proposal for a conference at Dartmouth College. Mathematicians and scientists met the following year to discuss how to make machines intelligent.
Back then, there wasn't one streamlined term for the field. Many associated the study with "cybernetics," which considers communication in machines. A 1951 Paris conference convened several cyberneticists.
Others used terms like "automata studies," which focused on self-operating machines. Claude Shannon, the so-called "father of information theory" and one of the 1956 conference's organizers, used this term.
And then there was "complex information processing." Computer science titan Herbert Simon described his work with this phrase.
When proposing the conference, computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence." The proposal was co-authored by Shannon, Marvin Minsky, and Nathaniel Rochester.
Many have played around with the language since then. Apple named its own product Apple Intelligence. Superintelligence as a name isn't new, either; it has ricocheted around Silicon Valley for years.
Still, AI has had a lasting footprint. It's in one of the leading companies' names: OpenAI.
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Henry Chandonnet is a senior reporter on the Business News desk. He writes about tech culture, from Silicon Valley's startup class to the everyday AI user. He also closely covers Big Tech and the workplace. Henry previously wrote for Fast Company, where he covered trending tech news. He's written for The Daily Beast, People Magazine, and Vulture.Email Henry at [email protected], reach him on Signal at henrychand.30, or follow him on X @HenryChandonnet.
