Tesla Quietly Retired the Name ‘Tesla AI,’ and It Beat SpaceX to the Switch

Tesla’s AI5 chip, which Elon Musk said the team taped out in April. Credit: Elon Musk/X

Tesla has renamed its artificial intelligence team’s X account from Tesla AI to Tesla Super Intelligence, swapping the @Tesla_AI handle for @TeslaSI and following through on Elon Musk’s push to replace “AI” with “SI.”

The change showed up on Thursday evening with no announcement attached. It’s the same account, with its May 2023 join date and roughly 511,000 followers intact, while the old @Tesla_AI handle no longer resolves on X. The account’s most recent post is still a September 4 note about FSD Supervised v14.3.9, so the first public word on the new name came from one of its engineers.

Yun-Ta Tsai, whose X bio now reads “Sr. Staff Engineer @TeslaSI,” posted at 7:02 p.m. PT that “Tesla Super Intelligence is the only one dedicated to solving real-world intelligence, from large-scale bits to atoms.” Musk reposted it a little over an hour later.

For anyone who hasn’t followed the account, Tesla AI was the public face of the group behind Full Self-Driving (Supervised), Tesla’s robotaxi service and its in-house AI chips. It posted the FSD v14.3 release notes in April, and in June it shared the notes for FSD v14 Lite on older Hardware 3 cars. In April, Musk congratulated the team’s chip designers on taping out AI5, adding that “AI6, Dojo3 & other exciting chips” were in the works.

The new name traces back to Washington, where on September 29 President Trump signed Executive Order 14434, which directs federal agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official correspondence, public communications and websites. The order applies to the executive branch, not to private companies.

Musk ran with the idea anyway, and on October 4 he posted “No more AI,” then “SI” and “It’s better,” before agreeing that SpaceXAI would be renamed SpaceXSI. Four days later, Tesla’s AI team has made the switch first. As of early Friday, the @SpaceXAI account still carried its old name, and no @SpaceXSI handle existed on X.

There’s still plenty Tesla hasn’t explained: it hasn’t posted an announcement about the change, and it hasn’t said whether the team has been formally renamed inside the company or whether its website and job listings will follow. There’s also no word on whether products like FSD or the AI5 chip will pick up “SI” branding. The @Tesla_Optimus account, home of Tesla’s humanoid robot, was unchanged as of Friday morning.

Musk, for his part, seems to be enjoying the new vocabulary. A couple of hours before the rename surfaced, he announced that “all super intelligence organizations” had agreed to move testing to Delta Airlines flights, “where accessing the Internet is utterly impossible.”

For the engineers shipping Tesla’s next FSD build, a new name on an X profile doesn’t change the work. For everyone else, it may take a while before anyone calls the next chip “SI5” with a straight face.