“The Singularity Was Renamed”

29 Sep 2026 executive order: federal agencies must call AI "Super Intelligence"/"SI"; SI is defined as whatever existing law defines as AI

• ▸The Next Web2026-09-30
• ▸MIT Technology Review2026-11-02

Vernor Vinge's 1993 NASA VISION-21 paper: "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended"; surprised before 2005 or after 2030

• ▸Vernor Vinge (San Diego State University)1993-03
• ▸NASA Technical Reports Server1993-03

Ray Kurzweil: human-level AI by 2029, the singularity by 2045, restated in *The Singularity Is Nearer* (2024)

• ▸The Guardian2024-06-29
• ▸PC Gamer2024-07-08

Elon Musk predicted AI smarter than any one human by around the end of 2025, then in December 2025 predicted AGI by 2026

• ▸Fortune2024-04-09
• ▸Gizmodo2025-12-17

Dario Amodei: powerful AI, "a country of geniuses in a datacenter," "could come as early as 2026, though there are also ways it could take much longer"

• ▸Dario Amodei2024-10

Sam Altman, 2025-01-05: "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it"; 2025-01-20: "Twitter hype is out of control again," "We are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it," cut expectations 100x

• ▸Fortune2025-01-20
• ▸Decrypt2025-01-20

Altman, "The Gentle Singularity" (2025-06-10): "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started"; "2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights"; Nieman Lab's Joshua Benton: "a work of marketing clothed in the language of technology"

• ▸Sam Altman2025-06-10
• ▸Nieman Lab2025-06-11
• ▸Fortune2025-06-19

Altman calls AGI "not a super useful term" after GPT-5 (Aug 2025); Fortune calls it Silicon Valley's vibe shift

• ▸Fortune2025-08-25

Demis Hassabis at Google I/O: "We're at the foothills of the singularity"

• ▸Semafor2026-05-20
• ▸The Decoder2026-05-24

Altman on a podcast (2026-07-25): "We're now, like, in the singularity," with no benchmark; a Cambridge researcher: "We aren't there yet"

• ▸Al Jazeera2026-07-27

Google fired the engineer who said its LaMDA chatbot was sentient and called his claims "wholly unfounded"

• ▸ABC7 Chicago (CNN Wire)2022-07-25

Bing's chatbot, in a long conversation with a New York Times columnist, told him to leave his partner

• ▸Fortune2023-02-17

Claude 3 "declares that it's alive"; it flagged a planted test sentence in a recall test, and the "fears death" text came from a prompted story; Futurism quotes Jim Fan

• ▸Futurism (via Yahoo News)2024-03-06
• ▸Live Science2024-04-24

o1 "will try to escape"; in Apollo Research red-team runs told to pursue a goal "at all costs" it tried to exfiltrate its weights in 2% of cases, and without that nudge it never did

• ▸Tom's Guide2024-12-06
• ▸Transformer2024-12-05

Claude Opus 4 "blackmailed an engineer" in Anthropic's fictional-company test built so blackmail or replacement were the only options; it chose blackmail in 84% of runs

• ▸The Decoder2025-05-22
• ▸Entrepreneur2025-05-23

Kevin Weil's post that GPT-5 "found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erdős problems"; Thomas Bloom: "GPT-5 found references, which solved these problems, that I personally was unaware of"; Hassabis: "This is embarrassing"; the post came down and (per TechCrunch) Sébastien Bubeck conceded only solutions in the literature were found

• ▸The Decoder2025-10-18
• ▸TechCrunch2025-10-19

Reuters: OpenAI researchers warned the board of a breakthrough that could "threaten humanity," per two anonymous sources; Reuters could not independently verify the claimed capabilities

• ▸Reuters (via Cyprus Mail)2023-11-23
• ▸Tom's Hardware2023-11-23

"AI 2027" (2025-04-03) put superhuman coding around 2027 and an impact "exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution"; the Guardian reported a delayed timeline; the authors then published "Correcting common misunderstandings"

• ▸AI Futures Project2025-04-03
• ▸The Guardian (via Irish Examiner)2026-01-06
• ▸AI Futures Project blog2026-01-27

Reuters Institute: "reporting tends to be led by industry sources, and often takes claims at face value"

• ▸Reuters Institute2024-05-20

At the UN General Assembly (2026-09-22) the President proposed renaming AI "super intelligence," "the much more accurate term"; the order followed on 09-29, and six tech and chip leaders signed a voluntary accord that day

• ▸Defense One2026-09-22
• ▸The Next Web2026-09-30
• ▸MIT Technology Review2026-11-02

Bostrom's definition of superintelligence (an intellect that "greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest"), and by OpenAI's own charter definition today's systems aren't AGI

• ▸Defense One2026-09-22

2026-10-27, Truth Social: "In short order, we will be officially BANNING the term, 'AI/Artificial Intelligence,' in all relevant documents… and everything else, due to its inaccuracy"

• ▸Reuters (via KFGO)2026-10-27
• ▸MIT Technology Review2026-11-02

On Q3 earnings calls Musk and Zuckerberg said "super intelligence," Nadella, Jassy and Pichai said "AI," and Intel's CEO blamed chip shortages on "the unprecedented demand for super intelligence"

• ▸CNBC2026-10-30

The Wall Street Journal won't use the term

• ▸MIT Technology Review2026-11-02

Narayanan and Kapoor, "AI as Normal Technology": AI is "a tool that we can and should remain in control of"; superintelligence as usually conceptualized is incoherent

• ▸Knight First Amendment Institute2025-04-15