After a day of grand gestures and pageantry, Donald Trump’s summit with China does not appear to have delivered anything substantive on trade, technology or Beijing’s support for Iran.
But the U.S. president did have one small thing to boast about on Friday morning: that his Chinese counterpart seems open to Trump’s desire to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence.”
“Very productive meeting with President Xi for both the U.S.A. and China. Tremendous things will be happening. Like almost everyone else, he seemed to like calling the poorly and inaccurately named Artificial Intelligence to a far more accurate and important name, SUPER INTELLIGENCE,” the 80-year-old president posted on Truth Social.
“That would be “SUPER!” Everyone last night agreed, also.”
The president’s comments came hours after his lavish dinner honoring Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party leader Trump once railed against.
“So wrong! @BarackObama is hosting China’s VP Xi Jinping today at the Pentagon with a full honor ceremony with music and cannon,” he posted in 2012, when Obama was president.
Asked in 2015 if he would ever throw Xi a state dinner, Trump said no, accusing China of “sucking all of our jobs.”
“I would get him a McDonald’s hamburger and say ‘we have to get down to work’,” he told Fox News.
This week, the U.S president struck a much different tone, rolling out the red carpet to welcome his 73-year-old counterpart, first at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, followed by a full arrival ceremony on the South Lawn on Thursday involving 479 military personnel, national anthems, a military review and a flyover by a B-2 bomber and four F-22 Raptors.
The state dinner on Thursday night was also an extravagant affair, with a menu curated by First Lady Melania Trump, performances by Trump’s favorite opera tenor Christopher Maccio and a guest list filled with tech titans, Supreme Court justices and American CEOs.
Trump and Melania welcomed Xi back to the White House on Friday morning for the final day of the summit, posing for photos and ignoring shouted questions from the press before taking the president and his wife into the White House Red Room for tea.
“Mr. President, did you call on President Xi to stop buying oil from Iran?” reporters shouted from the South Lawn.
“Why are you banning media outlets? Should U.S. taxpayers pay for ads about you, Mr. President?”
Trump simply replied, “Thank you, everybody,” before ushering his guests inside. After tea, the leaders and their wives visited the National Archives to view the U.S. Constitution.
But for all the pomp and ceremony, it is still not clear what the meeting has achieved in tangible outcomes.
On Iran, for instance, China continues to indirectly support the regime’s war effort through satellite targeting data, dual-use military components, and massive oil purchases.
On Taiwan, Xi pressed Trump to explicitly oppose Taiwan’s independence—a move that would require a shift in Washington’s longstanding position of “strategic ambiguity” and further restraint on American arms sales.
On trade, the two sides agreed only to extend an existing agreement by two months, but nothing substantive has been announced yet.
Pressed on what the summit had achieved, David Perdue, Trump’s U.S. Ambassador to China, told Fox News: “Look, the old adage of deliverables in a relationship that we have with China is really not measurable in many ways.
“In some ways, the best thing that we accomplished in this visit is to continue the conversation.”
The president on Friday also ignored a question about whether he had discussed with Xi the need to put guardrails on artificial intelligence, amid growing concerns that the technology could spiral out of control.
But with the two superpowers locked in a race to develop AI, neither leader appeared unnerved by the prospect this week.
“We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people,” Xi said on Thursday.
Trump, meanwhile, says he is happy to leave things as they are in the race for supremacy. He does, however, want to rebrand the term “artificial intelligence,” telling the United Nations this week that it sounded “fake.”
“From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial,” said Trump, a late convert to AI who has since become prolific at posting AI slop on Truth Social.
“In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence—SI. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better, and it’s much more accurate.”
