Geologists divide the Earth's history into eons, the largest slices they use. The Phanerozoic, the slice in which animal life becomes abundant in the fossil record, runs on the order of five hundred million years. Nobody holds that in a career. In ordinary English the word survived as a way to say "longer than a plan."

The labs building general models publish on a different clock. A model generation can be a season. A keynote can rename the category between the rumor and the ship date. In September 2026 the word Aeon circulated in reports about an unreleased OpenAI model string. Days later the company shipped an agent product and called it Dots. Both facts can be true. The calendar that produced them is the short one.

The mismatch

If the systems stay narrow, borrowing a geological word is a style choice. If they become good at a wide range of cognitive work, the mismatch is the story. Schools, courts, payrolls, and power grids turn over in years and decades. The training runs that moved the capability would have turned over in months. People inside the slow institutions would be asked to govern an object that was already on its next version.

This site uses the long word in that stricter sense. Superintelligence, if the definition on this site is the one in force, is not a feature in a release note. It is a change in who, or what, does the thinking that institutions are built around. The product news can be weekly. The question is not.