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Google may have said no, but Trump still wants to rename the Atlantic Ocean

US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at Crossroads Arena in Corinth, Mississippi, US, on Monday, Oct. 26, 2026. President Trump urged Republican voters to head to the polls during a campaign rally in deep-red Mississippi, saying he couldn't "take a chance" of Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith losing her seat.
At a campaign event in Corinth, Mississippi, on Monday, Trump once again raised his desire to rename an ocean.

Madison Thorn/Bloomberg via Getty Images

  • President Donald Trump isn't giving up on his plan to rename the Atlantic to the "American Ocean."
  • While he said last week that Google's CEO pushed back on the idea, he raised it again at a rally.
  • "We have a lake, and we have a gulf. Now we need a river and an ocean," Trump told supporters.

Donald Trump is eyeing up new names for more bodies of water, despite pushback from Google's CEO.

"We have a lake, and we have a gulf. Now we need a river and an ocean," he said at a rally in Mississippi on Monday.

The president spoke about renaming the Atlantic Ocean to the "American Ocean" and quipped: "I think Europe will be thrilled."

Trump previously raised the idea last Wednesday at a rally in South Carolina, where he said that Google CEO Sundar Pichai had tried to change his mind.

Trump said that he called Pichai, joking that Google was "still rattled" from his renaming of the Gulf.

Google Maps previously changed its labels for the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario to the Gulf of America and Lake America following Trump's executive orders. The tech giant said the decision aligns with its policy to draw on official government databases. Users outside the US still see the original names followed by Trump's names in brackets.

However, Trump said that when he pitched the idea of renaming the Atlantic, Pichai replied, "This time I'm not doing it."

"Oceans are different, sir. They cover really a lot of countries. Please don't ask us to do that."

"So I'll probably pass," Trump told the crowd last week. "I think let's keep it the Atlantic Ocean."

The president first brought up the idea at a Tennessee rally earlier this month, where he floated renaming either the Atlantic or the Pacific as "Trump Ocean" or "Ocean of the Americas."

While he also spoke on Monday about renaming a river, he told the Mississippi crowd that the state's namesake river won't be relabeled.

"The Mississippi River, I'm not changing the name of the Mississippi," Trump said. "I promise."

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Sundar Pichai says Google is far from the ‘end state’ of self-improving AI

Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Sundar Pichai says Google's researchers are using AI to help build the next AI models.

Hardik Chhabra/ The India Today Group via Getty Images

  • Sundar Pichai said Google was still in the early phases of recursively self-improving AI.
  • Researchers are working with AI agents to build better models, he said.
  • Sergey Brin recently said Google was "starting to get onto that RSI treadmill."

Google's AI models may be helping to build their successors, but CEO Sundar Pichai says the moment of fully self-improving AI is still a while away.

Speaking on an episode of the "Big Technology Podcast" this week, Pichai said that Google researchers were using AI agents to assist them when building models, but caveated that it was still early days.

"We are pretty far from the end state of RSI," said Pichai, referring to recursive self-improvement. "The right way to describe it is, you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. I would say you almost have agents helping AI researchers, in some automated way, work together to build these models."

Pichai added that he expected that continuum to keep making progress into next year.

Earlier this month, Google cofounder Sergey Brin said the company's Flash series of models, as well as Gemini 4, were demonstrating how AI was helping to build itself, and that Google was "starting to get onto that RSI treadmill."

"And now our researchers and the model work hand in hand to make the next version of the model," he said.

Brin has been increasingly involved in Google's Gemini efforts and has leveraged his power as cofounder to shift resources to projects he deems most effective, Business Insider previously reported. This has included pushing for more focus on RSI.

A report from the firm Gladstone AI, published earlier this month, said that most researchers interviewed from companies including Anthropic and DeepMind believed RSI will start within the next three to 12 months, and possibly sooner without government intervention.

In another moment on the "Big Technology Podcast," Pichai was asked about how much AI was being used to code internally. The company said in April that 75% of new code inside Google was generated by AI.

"That number in our world today is like meaningless in the sense that every part of code we now touch is influenced by AI deeply," Pichai said. With Gemini 4 Argon, he said, people were going to tackle harder problems. He also said Google was seeing a one-third decrease in code rollbacks, where software is reverted to a previous version because of a bug or system issue.

"And so I think people are writing code more productively, and better code with it," he said of AI tools.

Pichai also uses AI to track Google's model development and internal discussions, he told the "Sources" podcast this week.

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