WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump on Oct. 8 announced the recipients of the nation’s highest honors for scientific and technological achievement during a summit at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace in Washington.
Trump awarded medals to “six national treasures” in honor of their roles in advancing U.S. tech innovation.
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and AMD CEO Lisa Su received the National Medal of Science.
Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
The event, “A New Golden Age Summit,” brought together leading scientists, innovators, and technology leaders.
“We have an extremely high IQ audience, for a change,” Trump joked as he began his remarks at the summit.
He first honored Musk, calling him “one of the greatest technology founders to ever live.”
“Nobody thought it was possible to do the things he’s doing, and in so many different ways,” he said, citing his businesses SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink.
“Elon is our modern-day Thomas Edison.”
He acknowledged each of the other medal recipients and commended their achievements.
“A visionary computer scientist,” he said of Brin.
“The first time I heard that name, I said, ‘You must be kidding,’” Trump said, referring to Google. “And look what happened.”
He called Su a “trailblazer who revolutionized computer performance.”
He said Huang’s technology serves as the “backbone of frontier super intelligence.”
He also praised Dell and his wife as “unbelievable philanthropists” and thanked them for making enormous donations to his Trump accounts initiative. He also said Dell led a “revolution in personal computing.”
Trump also commended Nadella for turning Microsoft into “an early leader in super intelligence.”
During the event, Trump was presented with a medal his uncle, John G. Trump, received in 1983. President Ronald Reagan awarded the older Trump—a prominent electrical engineer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the National Medal of Science in 1983 for introducing new machines and methods that enabled the widespread application of ionizing radiation in medicine, industry, and atomic physics.
Reagan presented the award at a White House ceremony posthumously to John Trump’s son at the time.
During the summit on Oct. 8, the president also spoke about U.S. leadership in “super intelligence” development.
In an executive order he signed on Sept. 29, he officially mandated a name change for artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.” He ordered executive branch agencies to replace the name in official communications and non-statutory documents.
In an address to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 22, he said the word “artificial” makes the technology sound fake.
“It’s not fake. It’s actually amazing,” he said. “We have to be careful.”
On Oct. 8, the president also criticized anyone who still uses the term “AI.”
“The White House considers anyone who uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” he wrote on Truth Social.
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