President Trump recently claimed that we ought to call AI "superior" or "supreme" intelligence.

However, current AI chatbots fall far short of being any kind of supreme intelligence.

Deification reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI chatbots work.

False media, we don't need it, do we?It's fake that's what it be to 'ya, dig me?Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,Don’t believe the hype. —Public Enemy, Don’t Believe the Hype

False media, we don't need it, do we?It's fake that's what it be to 'ya, dig me?Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,Don’t believe the hype.

—Public Enemy, Don’t Believe the Hype

Artificial intelligence (AI) companies and their CEOs have claimed that chatbot “sentience” is on the horizon and that “AI singularity”—the point at which AI intelligence surpasses human intelligence—has already occurred. As we near the end of 2026, such unbridled hype about AI shows little sign of letting up.

This week, President Trump took that hype one step further, claiming that “the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence. A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomenon would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI.)”1 He then posted a poll asking which of these names was the “best,” with “superior” edging out the others when the poll closed.

The President got one thing right. “Artificial intelligence” is an inaccurate term to describe AI chatbots. But that’s because AI chatbots aren’t intelligent at all, much less superior or supreme.

The Fallibility of AI

AI chatbots are great at what they’re designed to do—mimicking human speech fluency so that users feel like they’re talking to another person and can’t tell the difference between AI and human output under blinded conditions.

But chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) are prone to fail at some of the most basic tasks, like........

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