A person’s relationship with god is a deeply personal one, which poses a real problem for corporations because it’s so hard to monetize that. Luckily, the ousted former CEO of Intel, Patrick Gelsinger, has figured out how to build a religion-based tech stack that will do the important work of placing a tiered premium model between a person and their faith.
According to a report from The Guardian, Gelsinger is currently serving as the executive chair and head of technology at Gloo, a company that offers AI-powered tools and platforms designed to reflect religious principles. The company offers two primary products: an AI chatbot that, per The Guardian, uses existing large language models fine-tuned to reflect the company’s preferred theological beliefs; and a workspace that is designed to be used by churches and ministries to help with pastoral work and ministry support. The company reportedly served “over 140,000 faith, ministry and non-profit leaders” with its solutions.
Supposedly, Gloo works with a variety of theological belief structures. Gelsinger told The Guardian the company’s platform can be customized so that “the Lutherans can be good with it, the Episcopalians can be good with it, the Catholics can be good [with it], the Assemblies of God can be good with it.”
That would probably be fine on its own, there are all sorts of niche AI tools, and basically everyone involved in the LLM game is either explicitly or tacitly building a product that reflects their views, whether it’s a Saudi Arabian firm building a chatbot trained on Islamic culture and principles or Elon Musk’s Grok behaving as MechaHitler. It is generally unsurprising that someone would try to get into the business of building a chatbot for believers.
But Gelsinger, a born-again Christian, has a lot of say about this project and what he hopes to come of it. According to The Guardian, Gelsinger said, “My life mission has been [to] work on a piece of technology that would improve the quality of life of every human on the planet and hasten the coming of Christ’s return.” Of course, Christ’s return would spell the end of the humanity, which would not be great for every human on the planet. Luckily, Gelsinger’s attempts to expedite the second coming via selling churches on a chatbot subscription or whatever are probably no more likely to be a conduit to the End Times than those TikTokers predicting the Rapture.
That doesn’t seem like it’ll stop Gelsinger from selling the idea hard, though. He said during a seminar that AI represents “another Gutenberg moment,” and called on the church to quickly adopt and use the technology. “And so my question today is: are we going to embrace [and] shape AI as a technology that truly does become a powerful embodiment of the church and the expression of the church?” he reportedly said.
People are already talking to chatbots as if they are a god, or allowing the chatbot to convince them that they are themselves a god. It’d probably be best for all of us still stuck on Earth until the second coming that we not lean too hard into that.
