This week has seen an uptick of interest by some domain investors in superintelligence, and the possibility that the Slovenia .si extension will find adoption for the sector.

For some time I had been considering an article on terms used in artificial intelligence. This seemed like a good time to write that article, and to include a superintelligence focus. Note that at this point any association of the .si extension with super intelligence is speculative.

Superintelligence and .SI

As far as I know, recent interest in the possible link between the .si domain extension and super intelligence started with the June 23, 2024 X post by Abhin.

Only hours later a number of investors had registered names, and @Andreas B. started the NamePros Showcase Your .SI Domains Super Intelligence.

Microsoft Own Copilot.si; Was It Recently Acquired?

The X post implies, perhaps, that Microsoft recently acquired the domain name, a direct match to their well-known artificial intelligence product Copilot. But was the acquisition recent?

The domain name copilot.si was created on June 23, 2017, long before the development and release of Copilot by Microsoft in February 2023. It has been continuously registered since then.

I researched the domain name at DomainIQ but did not get a Whois history beyond the current. While I don’t have a paid account, DomainTools Whois does show 3 hosting changes on 4 unique servers over 7 years. I could not definitively establish if there was a recent move of the domain to Microsoft.

As far as I know a sale of the domain name has not been announced. If someone has evidence for recent acquisition by Microsoft, please comment below and I will update this article. Copilot.si is currently registered by Microsoft at Markmonitor, a registrar frequently used by major corporations.

Major companies register their brand name, and names of key products or services, in most country codes, either for regional use, national market use, possible future use, or brand protection. For example, IBM.si, Apple.si, and Amazon.si all are all registered by the corresponding companies, and have been for some time.

Microsoft owning copilot.si does not by itself indicate a move to the extension for superintelligence. However, superintelligence has been in the news for other reasons during the past week, as we cover below.

Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Probably the more significant move on the superintelliigence front has been the establishment of Safe Superintelligence Inc. by Ilya Sutskever, Open AI co-founder, along with two colleagues, Daniel Gross, an AI expert formerly at Apple, and Daniel Levy, previously at OpenAI.

That company has a single mission, to develop safe superintelligence. You can read about it on their website SSI.inc. They made an interesting web choice to go for the acronym SSI and to use the .inc extension.

Note that they did not choose the .si extension for their website. I checked, and safe.si had been registered for some time, perhaps by an academic.

Super Intelligence or Superintelligence?

My Canadian word processing dictionary tells me ‘super intelligence’ should be two words, but Merriam-Webster shows ‘superintelligence’ as a single dictionary word. Collins does not show it as a term in their online dictionary at time of writing.

It seems that experts in the field generally write superintelligence as a single word.

How To Check Whois for .SI Names

Some registrar whois services do not show records for the .si extension. You can, however, look up Whois information for .si names at Register.si.

.SI Registration Numbers

The registry site also provides a table showing the status of the extension, making it easy to track registration trends – I wish every registry did this. Shown below are statistics from on June 24, 2024. We see that there are more than 156,000 registered domains in total, with 500 new registrations in the previous 24 hours, indicating some uptick in registrations.

Registering .SI Names

While 88 registrars are available for the .si extension, the registrars most often used by domain investors do not yet support the extension. The majority of registrars handling .si are European. There are huge price differences, so if you are planning to register any .si domain names use a resource like TLD-list or TLDES to compare prices.

Web Results on .SI

As one use indicator for the extension, I used the Google site:.si command, with Tools to indicate number of web results. I found 69.8 million search results on the .si extension. By comparison, .ai has 86.2 million and .io 394 million.

Keep in mind, however, that Slovenia has a population of more than 2 million, so would expect a fair amount of national web results from that population, wheres .ai is the country code for Anguilla with a population of only about 15,000, and .io is now a restricted territory.

Google Trends for Superintelligence

I used Google Trends to see if there was a recent uptick in searches for the term. I looked both for a single term ‘superintelligence’ and as two separate words ‘super intelligence’.

Relative interest from Google Trends, for split terms ‘super intelligence’ over the past 5 years.​

Yes, there is a slight uptick lately, but overall not a lot of change except for a big peak starting about the end of November 2020. I poured through media releases from the AI firms and academic research groups, but could not find the source of that interest. Eventually I discovered it: the romantic comedy Superintelligence was released by Warner Bros. on Nov. 26, 2020! Yes, the storyline does involve superintelligence.

But What Exactly Is Superintelligence?

IBM refer to Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) as

…cutting-edge cognitive functions and highly developed thinking skills more advanced than any human.

There is a comprehensive entry on superintelligence at Wikipedia with good references, including the definition

A superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds.

In summer 2023 OpenAI announced the Superalignment project to work on superintelligence. That document says

Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.

That document also speculates on how long until superintelligence is achieved. Now that Ilya Sutskever, who was to lead superalignment at OpenAI, has left the company to start Safe Superintelligence, the status of the OpenAI project is less clear.

The Book on Superintelligence

The best known book on superintelligence was written in 2016 by University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. Here is the link to the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies on Amazon, but odds are your public library has a copy – mine did. Professor Bostrom has a well-developed website covering his diverse research and writing at NickBostrom.com.

If you just want an overview of Superintelligence, GoodReads has an extensive set of quotations from the book.

Status Key TLDs for Term Superintelligence

I checked out use of the term superintelligence in several key extensions:

• .com – redirects to IQCO, an intelligent consulting company
• .ai – registered, but no website
• .io – in use by the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance
• .org – registered but not in use
• .co – developed website, goal to establish transhumans
• .xyz – registered but not in use
• .net– redirects to IQCO, an intelligent consulting company

Should We Be Dropping Artificial?

As the role of humans and artificial intelligence systems become more interwoven, and in an era when artificial intelligence is so ubiquitous, does it make sense to now simply talk about ’intelligence’ without the qualifier artificial?

Hybrid Intelligence

Many argue that we should be wary of artificial intelligence in isolation, so is it time to talk about ’hybrid intelligence’? This would be systems where leading AI tools are used, but always in conjunction with human oversight and direction.

There is a Hybrid Intelligence Center. You can download the proceedings of their annual conferences, should you want to delve deeper into this topic. The Hybrid Intelligence Center include the following as part of their mission statement:

Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is the combination of human and machine intelligence, expanding human intellect instead of replacing it. HI takes human expertise and intentionality into account when making meaningful decisions and perform appropriate actions, together with ethical, legal and societal values.

Domains and Business Names

I used dotDB to determine the number of extensions registered in various intelligence terms, as well as total appearances in longer domain names. I also used OpenCorporates to see the number of active business and organization names with different terms.

It is not surprising that AI is the most registered, in 633 extensions, followed closely by ’ArtificialIntelligence’ at 525. I was somewhat surprised that the hyphenated ‘artificial-intelligence’ was registered in almost as many, 469 extensions, along with more than a thousand longer domain names.

The term ’intelligence’ alone is registered in 317 TLDs, but appears in more than 47,000 longer domain names. That would include all of the artificial intelligence names of course.

I wondered how the adjective ’intelligent’ would compare, and the exact term is registered in 291 extensions, but present in more than 25,000 longer domain names. That makes sense, as it makes sense in denoting something else like ‘IntelligentSystems’.

The OpenCorporates data provided some surprises. If we require the terms ’artificial intelligence’ to be present, not necessarily in that order, and with the possibility of intervening terms, there were 1262 listed businesses and organizations. However, if we consider only a business that includes ’artificialintelligence’ without spaces anywhere in the name there are 0.

If we look at ’super intelligence’, as separate words there are 8, but combined into a single word there are 6. Clearly it is still very early days for superintelligence.

The combination ’business intelligence’ is actually slightly more used in business names than ‘artificial intelligence’, at least as of today, with 1797.

Of course the vast majority of businesses choose a distinctive brandable name, over one that includes the niche or sector they work in. The data presented for company names in the table above does not incorporate that, so does not definitively show interest in a sector.

I could not check for hyphenated names in OpenCorporates as it treats the hyphen as a separator and if you search for ‘artificial-intelligence’ it gives the same results as ‘artificial intelligence’.

There was a bit of use of ‘hybrid intelligence’ in business names.

Other Extensions Ending in I

But will there be other terms + intelligence achieve note? Among TLDs with an i ending are (in addition to .ai and .si) .bi, .ci, .fi, .gi, .ki, .li, .ni, and .vi. There are a few other TLDs ending in I, such as .mobi and .desi. Mob intelligence for .mobi, anyone?

Business intelligence is a well known and used term, as we saw above, that would fit .bi, but I don’t know if it has any actual use for that.

Other Interpretations for SI

Si is the chemical symbol for silicon, a critical semiconductor material – read more in Silicon Semiconductor: A Comprehensive Guide. Silicon is also used in photovoltaic solar panels – see Solar Photovoltaic Cell Basics.

SI also is the standard abbreviation for the International System of Units, based on the French Système International. This is the official units for your country, unless you live in the United States, Liberia or Myanmar.

Abbreviations.com lists almost 50 acronyms for SI, including system integration, standard interface, signal integrity, safety index, software institute, special investigator, and dozens more. Of course detractors of .si domain name registrations by investors would point to ‘Stop It’.

Since ’si’ in Spanish, Italian and some other languages means ‘yes’, the domain extension has found use in websites for some movements, campaigns and political parties in other regions.

Domain hack fans will know that pep.si redirects to the well-known brand. There are also at least a few other domain hacks using the extension.

Some of the examples given in this section are found in the Wikipedia article on the .si extension.

Further Reading

As I was well along with this article, I noticed that @equity78 had written
.Si = SuperIntelligence? Some are hoping to make it the next trend. That article includes a nice table of the relatively small number of .si domain name sales listed on NameBio.

Also, @Acroplex just published List of country code (ccTLD) domains representing computer intelligence and tech acronyms.. That list is much more extensive than the one I outlined above, as his list was not confined to extensions ending in i.

And don’t forget the Showcase Your .SI Domains Super Intelligence discussion started by @Andreas B..

As a final bit of research, I asked the AI chat bot available at app.superintelligence.co “Is the .si domain extension suitable for superintelligence?” It told me “Something went wrong! Please try again.”

Remember that any domain investment is speculative, so invest only what you can afford to potentially lose. Especially when there is a sparse record of prior sales, or a niche/sector is relatively new, there is greater uncertainty. Of course greater risk can also be associated with greater potential opportunity. See the NamePros Blog article Catching Trains and Avoiding Train Wrecks. Do your own research before any domain investment.

Acknowledge NameBio, dotDB,and OpenCorporates for data provided here, along with the .si registry. As disclosure, I own 5 domain names in the .si extension.