from artificial to super: why thesmallmediacompany now says super intelligence

from october 2026, thesmallmediacompany calls super intelligence — SI — what most people still call artificial intelligence. our new pages, stories and products use SI. the pages we wrote before stay exactly as they are. and wherever european law asks us to tell you that you are talking to an artificial intelligence, we use the law’s words.

a name is not a label stuck on afterwards. it is the first thing a reader believes about something. «artificial» has asked everyone, for seventy years, to see these systems as imitations — and that frame has been wrong for a while now.

we never called the computer an artificial calculator, or the smartphone an artificial pocket computer. «artificial» was always the odd word out. — alessandro facchini, founder

the world this lands in

the old name has a birthday. on 31 august 1955, john mccarthy, marvin minsky, nathaniel rochester and claude shannon proposed a summer study of «artificial intelligence», on the conjecture that every feature of intelligence could be described so precisely «that a machine can be made to simulate it» (the dartmouth proposal, republished in ai magazine, 2006). simulation was the promise, and the word kept it.

the new name arrived this september. on 22 september 2026 the us president told the un general assembly «welcome to the new world of super intelligence», and on 29 september he signed the executive order «inaugurating the era of super intelligence», which tells federal agencies to write «super intelligence» and «SI» in their public communications, because the technology is no longer «imitating or automating human intelligence». the same day, the leaders of google, anthropic, meta, openai, xai and nvidia signed a separate commitment with the white house on how they will handle these frontier systems. the order changes words, not laws: for now it borrows the existing statutory definition of ai, and a federal definition of SI is due within sixty days (iapp).

in europe nothing in the law has moved: the ai act still defines an «ai system», and its article 50 still requires that people be told when they are dealing with one. what has moved is use. in italy the share of companies with ten or more employees using at least one of these technologies doubled in a year, from 8.2% to 16.4% — it was 5.0% in 2023 (istat, december 2025). across the union it is 20%, and 55% of large enterprises (eurostat, december 2025).

why we say SI

because the technology has outgrown the word, and it will keep doing so. in italy their use in companies doubled in a single year, and we expect the next months to move faster still. a media company built on them should not describe them with a word chosen in 1955 to promise an imitation.

and because «artificial» has always distorted how people feel about them. nobody calls a computer an artificial calculator. we name tools by what they let us do. «artificial» invites suspicion before anything has been said — the sense that whatever comes out of it is fake by definition. that is not what we see when a person works well with these systems: we see more of that person, not less.

that is the meaning we give the word. super intelligence, for us, is not a machine that is smarter than you. it is what a person can do with these systems at their side — amplified by them, never abandoned to them. it is the same thing we have always said, finally with a name that does not undercut it.

what it does not do

it does not claim that machines have overtaken people. it does not change a single product, nor how any of them works. it does not rewrite what we have already published: those pages keep the words they were written with, and we will not pretend otherwise. and it is not a position on american politics: the word reached us through a us executive order, and we take the word, not the platform.

the part we’re most careful about

the law. the eu ai act requires that people know when they are talking to an artificial intelligence, and that disclosure only works if everyone understands it. so on the lamp, in our privacy policy, in our terms and in every product that speaks, the disclosure keeps the law’s own words. when a voice of ours tells you what it is, it will say it in the words a regulator, a court and you all recognise. a new name is a choice of voice; a disclosure is a duty, and duties do not get rebranded.

where this goes

from this month the word appears in what we publish next, in both languages: «super intelligence (SI)» the first time on a page, «SI» after that. a federal definition of SI is due in the united states by the end of november, and we will read it before we write another line about it. the note at the foot of every page of this site says the same thing in two sentences.

how we work with SI →