YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The super intelligence shit is a humiliation ritual for OpenAI

60 points doener 1 hour ago 41 comments

techblueberry 1 hour ago | parent

I might challenge the idea this is “smart politics”. Like I can get the tactics, but it feels disconnected from a greater strategy.

The best I can figure out is I guess good for the next two years having people subordinate to your administration.

trescenzi 1 hour ago | parent

The keyword is `regime`. It’s smart if the goal is to run a political regime where you separate your friends and enemies and prove to your friends that you can make them jump when you say jump.

xvxvx 56 minutes ago | parent

It may not even be as thought out as that. I think he’s simply trying to link his Presidency to AI in a way that lasts. So of AI does take over the world, which it won’t, it will be his legacy, of sorts.

But yeah, in the meantime it’s a humiliation ritual. Good.

genxy 30 minutes ago | parent

He wants "naming rights" and a way to pump the ccTLD for Slovenia, which he used to have connection to.

If you name it, you own it.

rubikscube09 27 minutes ago | parent

lmfao i didn't even think of the slovenia part.

jjgreen 23 minutes ago | parent

Look at the price of .si domains the weeks before the announcement, gravy train ...

BLKNSLVR 42 minutes ago | parent

Meta commentary warning.

WTF platform has to split that over three posts. I mean, at least it's not Twitter, but choose a platform that's fit for purpose.

Heronsunny 34 minutes ago | parent

Legacy framing feels off to me, the loyalty tests usually have a much shorter horizon than that, they're about who shows up this quarter.

dfxm12 32 minutes ago | parent

I've noticed it has another benefit of giving the administration an out when they get hard questions about AI. They can huff and puff about calling it SI instead of answering the question.

LogicFailsMe 30 minutes ago | parent

At some point you have to start laughing maniacally at the spinelessness of America's top paper billionaires, or it gets very dark, very fast.

UltraSane 19 minutes ago | parent

I really don't understand what the point of being so rich is if it doesn't let you tell a moron like Trump to fuck off.

ramesh31 13 minutes ago | parent

>"I really don't understand what the point of being so rich is if it doesn't let you tell a moron like Trump to fuck off."

Because they aren't really rich. It's all a house of cards built on numbers in a spreadsheet, vague IP valuations, and server racks. The people controlling the true wealth are getting exactly what they want in the form of inflation on commodity and asset prices.

estearum 11 minutes ago | parent

You must remember that the current top-of-the-top are fundamentally psychologically broken people. They started as emotionally stunted weirdos, got bullied for it, became more reclusive for it, built their mega-businesses with maniacal fixation, and now have huge sums of money to inflict their psychological traumas on the world.

serf 3 minutes ago | parent

they got rich by wanting to get rich and make money; that's the entire motivation and it doesn't have a ceiling.

you don't just get rich and stop, it doesn't stop for these people. They aren't rich enough. They aren't powerful enough.

Most folks at that table with Trump are way beyond the joy of creation; they're playing politics now, and their game is the competition with the 200 other hyper-elite for positional vying.

malshe 11 minutes ago | parent

When Jack Ma disappeared for months because he pissed off Xi, I thought this would never happen in the US. We aren't there yet but moving in that direction at a swift pace.

speak_plainly 26 minutes ago | parent

For many outside the US, and undoubtedly some within it, the term SI is a source of embarrassment. But it’s good to know who bends the knee.

sdcfgy 10 minutes ago | parent

I read that as the US being the SI unit for embarrassment for a minute.

georgemcbay 9 minutes ago | parent

> For many outside the US, and undoubtedly some within it, the term SI is a source of embarrassment.

Speaking as one of those in the US, we have so much to be embarrassed about that the "super intelligence" thing barely registers on the scale.

I mean, yeah, it is stupid, but it is relatively quaint when compared to:

the stupidest war we've ever gotten ourselves into (high bar), the random murderous boat strikes, the immigration debacle and continued state-sanctioned murdering of both innocent immigrants and American citizens, the concentration camps (yes, we have concentration camps), the abandonment of the previous rules-based world order, the constant threatening of our own allies, the ongoing religification, loyalty purge and subsequent weakening of the US military, the quadrupling down on a fossil fuel economy in the face of very real climate change impacts globally, the very real and IMO likely possibility the current administration will attempt to nullify our upcoming election if it doesn't go their way, etc, etc.

dofm 4 minutes ago | parent

A silly joke until being on the right side of it becomes a loyalty test, like election fraud, Trump’s intellect, height and weight, etc.

The point of something stupid like this is the power he gains by making you agree to say it.

It shocks me that people don’t understand who he is. Ignorant yes, vile, bigoted, cruel, illiterate, all those things. But he is not domain-generally stupid: he is a terrible genius at humiliation, at breaking people, at hollowing them out.

It may not be work, finally. But he is better at it than any other living person.

ForHackernews 21 minutes ago | parent

wtf now I love kissing the ring

pebbly_bread 20 minutes ago | parent

For my sanity I don't follow US politics too closely, if "super intelligence" is truly being pushed hard then it seems reasonable to assume the reason why is to assert control of truth. Who are you to disagree with Super Intelligence when it tells you that Haitians are eating dogs?

estearum 16 minutes ago | parent

We just have an actual retard in the Oval Office, that's all. It's not much more than that.

dieselgate 19 minutes ago | parent

Is there more context anyone can give to help understand what’s going on: I read the post but curious if AGI is just morphing into SI in lingo? Why is it being politicized?

well_ackshually 16 minutes ago | parent

The US's shit head in chief has unilaterally decided that it's no longer artificial intelligence but super intelligence. Now it's a game of waiting to see which of the lapdogs is the fastest one to obey.

api 11 minutes ago | parent

Trump is doing another of his loyalty test stunts: give a ridiculous order, see who complies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD5eqBDPMDg

Supermancho 7 minutes ago | parent

> Why is it being politicized?

The US (without the imagined AI valuations) is in a full blown recession. The US treasury/administration is leveraging belief/investment in AI to keep the numbers up (oversimplified, but not by much). This means the administration has a vested interest in keeping AI churning and investment growing with no fallback except maybe the chaos of trying to start off a wartime economy? Because there are few recognizable AI players and the administration is not above extortion (choosing winners), they are leveraging the DOJ regulatory powers (witholding introducing barriers) to push a new grift. The situation is not strictly political, as much as it's a form of corruption.

daemonologist 7 minutes ago | parent

No, the directive is that all AI should now be called super intelligence (SI), and this stems from a single decision from the president rather than being an ongoing political debate. (AI was of course political before, but this terminology seems to have come out of nowhere.)

Why, I don't know. The OP's "purity test" theory is a possibility.

dylan604 3 minutes ago | parent

This is coming from the same person that didn't realize there was a b in dumb. The same person that likes to rename bodies of water. The same person that wants his name and/or his face on everything. It did not come out of nowhere unless nowhere is the void in the brain space of said same person.

kyle-rb 7 minutes ago | parent

A few weeks ago Donald Trump put a series of polls via Truth Social and Twitter with 3 choices for a replacement name for Artificial Intelligence (which according to him makes it sound like it's fake when it's actually real).

The initial choices were: "Supreme Intelligence", "Superior Intelligence", "Extreme Intelligence". [0]

Then he removed "Supreme Intelligence" because he said it reminded people of the failing Supreme Court, and it was down to just "Superior" or "Extreme". [1]

Then, presumably after some industry people talked him into a compromise, he decided it was actually between "Superior" or "Super Intelligence", and the latter won. [2]

[0] https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/2101350559328416142

[1] https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/2101698074166882517

[2] https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2102067457506611585

kristofferR 1 minute ago | parent

Trump did a Twitter poll about what word should replace Artifical Intelligence. Super Intelligence won [1]. He did an executive order officiating the renaming [2]. Now The White House considers people who still use the term "AI" as "THE ENEMY":

[1] https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/2101350559328416142

[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/29/trump-signs-executi...

[3] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1174061766043...

aatd86 18 minutes ago | parent

I am simply not purchasing a .si domain.

If really a new expression need to be coined, that should be something that means derived Intelligence/type II Intelligence etc. What is intelligence anyway?

It's just a weird attempt at cementing some legacy. The rest of the world is not going to go along with it.

Then again, flattering thinking machines is not too bad, ... just in case :D

usern20260720 17 minutes ago | parent

“Don’t call it AI, call it ‘American Skynet System’”.

Chatgpt.ass

dylan604 4 minutes ago | parent

That's already in use for a subtitle format. I have many .ass files lying around.

malshe 15 minutes ago | parent

There is also the consipracy theory that MAGA people in Trump's inner orbit started buying up .si domain names in June.

ddoolin 4 minutes ago | parent

I hate this "it sounds ridiculous and it is BUT it could just be 4D chess and here's why..."

Stop justifying this crap. It's just the drivel of a decaying mind.

charcircuit 4 minutes ago | parent

Their name wasn't OpenAGI. They can be OpenAI who is a company working on super intelligence.

getfacl 2 minutes ago | parent

The thing about this is, that when a new technology truly succeeds the name fades away. The same will happen with .ai or .si if anyone takes that seriously.

We don't call HDTVs that anymore. We just call them TVs. Like what happened when Color TVs became the norm.

At some point a Self-Driving Car will just be a car.

At some point mentioning that a product includes AI will sound silly because it will just be a given.

At that point having ai inclusion be part of the products name will sound as outdated as saying Color TV.