Why SpaceXAI Is Rebranding As SpaceXSI

By Michael Frank
Elon Musk making a face while staring at his phone. Alex Wong/Getty Images
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In a rebrand that rolls off the tongue like Lake Amerigo Vespucci, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday that the company's artificial intelligence arm which had been called SpaceXAI, will now be called SpaceXSI. The letter "S" stands for super, and "I" is, yes, still meant to indicate intelligence.

This follows President Donald Trump's push to use the term super intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. First, Trump told the U.N. General Assembly last month that the name artificial intelligence had the air of something fake. "It makes it sound fake and it is not fake. It's actually amazing," Trump said to the diplomatic body (as reported by Associated Press News). Shortly afterwards, the State Department ordered that U.S. diplomats ditch the term artificial intelligence and use super intelligence instead for all official correspondence. 

Then, this past Tuesday, tech leaders signed a voluntary, not-legally-binding-at-all pledge. The event was attended by prominent executives of major AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and that of course includes xAI CEO Elon Musk. On Sunday, as Musk was tweeting about SpaceXSI, the White House created a new super intelligence task force — which maybe will do more or less than what the Space Force does.

Super intelligent labeling, right?

The Space X logo on the side of a company building during the day. Sundry Photography/Getty Images

As for the Tesla maker's relabeling, it all feels very Musk seat-of-the-pants. On Sunday, Musk wrote on X that, "Yes, we ​will make that change," in reply to a user on the platform named X Freeze who posited the question, "Any possibility of renaming to SpaceXSI??" So far, however, at least on X, SpaceXSI only comes up as a search term, not an actual handle or identity, and SpaceXAI is still an official entity on the platform. Likewise, so is the url, https://x.ai/, whereas https://x.si/ takes you the online equivalent of a black hole — but certainly not to an extant concern in Musk's empire.

Reuters reported that Musk didn't clarify with exactly when the name change would occur. SpaceXAI itself also didn't offer comment in response to Musk's relabeling of the brand behind the artificial intelligence tool Grok and other AI applications. Whatever you call it — artificial or super — probably won't change America's grim mood that all those data centers under construction will output as much CO2 as 24 million cars. Or that AI data centers may cause a new chip shortage. Super awesome and sparkly, newfangled names tend to not matter when people can't afford gas and food.

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