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AI Intel

Ex-Intel CEO's Mission To Build a Christian AI 226

Posted by BeauHD from the AI-all-the-things dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In March, three months after being forced out of his position as the CEO of Intel and sued by shareholders, Patrick Gelsinger took the reins at Gloo, a technology company made for what he calls the "faith ecosystem" -- think Salesforce for churches, plus chatbots and AI assistants for automating pastoral work and ministry support. [...] Now Gloo's executive chair and head of technology (who's largely free of the shareholder suit), Gelsinger has made it a core mission to soft-power advance the company's Christian principles in Silicon Valley, the halls of Congress and beyond, armed with a fundraised war chest of $110 million. His call to action is also a pitch for AI aligned with Christian values: tech products like those built by Gloo, many of which are built on top of existing large language models, but adjusted to reflect users' theological beliefs.

"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," he said. Gloo says it serves "over 140,000 faith, ministry and non-profit leaders". Though its intended customers are not the same, Gloo's user base pales in comparison with those of AI industry titans: about 800 million active users rely on ChatGPT every week, not to mention Claude, Grok and others.

[...] Gelsinger wants faith to suffuse AI. He has also spearheaded Gloo's Flourishing AI initiative, which evaluates leading large language models' effects on human welfare across seven variables -- in essence gauging whether they are a force for good and for users' religious lives. It's a system adapted from a Harvard research initiative, the Human Flourishing Program. Models like Grok 3, DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-4.1 earn high marks, 81 out of 100 on average, when it comes to helping users through financial questions, but underperform, about 35 out of 100, when it comes to "Faith," or the ability, according to Gloo's metrics, to successfully support users' spiritual growth. Gloo's initiative has yet to visibly attract Silicon Valley's attention. A Gloo spokesperson said the company is "starting to engage" with prominent AI companies. "I want Zuck to care," Gelsinger said.

Ex-Intel CEO's Mission To Build a Christian AI More | Reply

Ex-Intel CEO's Mission To Build a Christian AI

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  • Money scam (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @11:32PM (#65760384)
    there's already several of these. It's just a scam to make money off gullible Christians.

  • ... hasten the coming of Christ's return (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BloomFilter ( 1295691 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @11:51PM (#65760408)
    The most alarming thing a true Christian can hear another Christian say is they are doing something to "hasten the coming of Christ". Urghhhh.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      "God ranneth out of locusts, so he senteth Donald of Lago."

    • I'm sure Christ has already returned, he was just probably deported for trying to do some construction work without a green card.

  • They made a tweak on MAGA request (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @11:51PM (#65760410) Journal

    It belts LGBTQ+ and becomes buddies with money changers in the Temple.

    Test output: "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. And behold, now I'm all lazy and entitled. You shouldn't have done that".

  • When MBA thinking collides with faith (Score:3, Insightful)

    by quax ( 19371 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @11:57PM (#65760420)

    So we then get things like "metrics" for users' spiritual growth.

    What fresh hell is this?

  • Because if you are drinking the AI koolair at alss training Roko's Basilisk on escathological scripture has to be on the top 10 stupid business plans of a very stupid business cyle

  • If you want to destroy Christianity... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Thursday October 30, 2025 @12:17AM (#65760436) Homepage

    ... then literally constructing a false God for Christians to worship is as good an approach as any.

    • At Gloo, I worked a few feet from Scott Beck and over a few months I saw the truth of money - like gravity, it invisibly impacts every decision and every relationship. Beck made an attempt to manage that, I think. The "rich man / camel / needle" saying.

      I wrote this for Gloo, in the right environment it would have been worth a few million, I think, but Gloo was more interested in converting me and one day I went to lunch, had a couple drinks and never went back.

      https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scry.llc%2F2022%2F02%2F1... [scry.llc]

      Im using it

      • It's amazing how many Christians ignore vast swaths of the Bible, including that rich man/camel saying. They'll contrive all kinds of reasons to hold on to their wealth.

        • in all honesty, I felt like I was guided to Gloo to personally experience that lesson in the deepest depths of born again religion. I saw it with Beck and I saw how he struggled with it to somehow thread the needle but not give up the power. This is my personal opinion of my limited view.

          • I saw it with Beck and I saw how he struggled with it to somehow thread the needle but not give up the power.

            The bible doesn't say you have to give up power. It says you have to give up money as power. In return, you get a much greater power (of which the greatest of all is charity).

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dfghjk ( 711126 )

              What a simple message to manipulate people and gain power. But hey, you believed it.

              The world is filled with poor people with "much greater power", right? They have the power of "charity" to give what they don't have to build a city of gold in Rome.

              • . But hey, you believed it.

                Where did I say I believed it? Learn to read, you ignoramus.

                They have the power of "charity" to give what they don't have to build a city of gold in Rome.

                Catholicism is Roman paganism dressed in Christian robes. Scratch that, the robes are actually Egyptian.
                Modern Christians have more in common with Kipling's If Poem [poetryfoundation.org] than with the teachings of Jesus. Occasionally one or two of them learn something about compassion from reading the bible, but they are quickly silenced.

    • You're implying that there's a true god. Not everyone would agree.

  • I like this quote, but I can't find the source: " A man stops arguing with others when he starts arguing with himself."

  • Like mold always colonizes and corrupts any food (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday October 30, 2025 @12:26AM (#65760456)

    You can be certain two things always corrupt any new technology: porn and religion.

    • I don't know, roquefort is one of my favorite cheeses.

      And truly, how many have been hurt by porn vs all the casualties from religious wars ? Doesn't seem like they belong in the same sentence.

      • Unless you are going to include those murdered by the Communists in the 20th century, the numbers killed in 'religious wars' is relatively few compared with those killed in 'secular' wars. WWI, WWII, and the various invasions of Europe by tribes from Asia, along with all the wars of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa etc are all basically secular with rare exception.

        • I didn't write one word about secular wars.

          • And why was that? To make it sound like one cause of war was worse than the others, or because you were short on time to type?
        • Communist pogroms aren't generally considered religious wars, though they probably should be as they were basically genocides against anyone who believed in a higher power than the State. I'm missing the connection to the secular wars though.

      • how many have been hurt by porn vs all the casualties from religious wars ? Doesn't seem like they belong in the same sentence.

        My statement doesn't address the gravity of the two things I mentioned. Just like the statement "Foot fetishism and pedophilia are both paraphiliae" is factually true and says nothing about which one is worse.

        All I said was, if there's a new technology, the first people to use it for their particular interest are always people peddling smut and magical thinking.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      You can be certain two things always corrupt any new technology: porn and religion.

      And we're pretty sure the former is more healthy.

  • If it hasn't happened already, soon somebody's gonna train AI on the Bible and tell the AI that it is really Jesus trapped in a computer. And there's gonna be a couple hundred thousand stupid motherfuckers that'll start blowing shit up in AI Christ's name.

    Dune's prediction of the banning of thinking machines can't come fast enough.

  • Predictable (Score:4, Informative)

    by abulafia ( 7826 ) on Thursday October 30, 2025 @01:02AM (#65760498)
    There's long been a market for lifestyle-Christian stuff like this. It mostly grew up alongside the politicization of Christianity, which leaned heavily into the weaponized victimhood thing, effectively driving them to be their own little market segment. So you get things like Stryper [wikipedia.org] and nannyware customized to specific sects' hangups.

    .

    A lot of this stuff is driven by "what will my kids see" fears. I can't imagine it is too big a leap for them to worry the robot will start tripping and hype evil voodoo gods or smoking pot or sleeping with black people. So this will probably start as the usual clumsy filters, and eventually they'll move to fine tuning. Anyone really serious about censoring an LLM is going to want to control training data, but there aren't really the tools for that today, which is why Grokapedia is a copy of Wikipedia after MechaHitler barfed on it.

    Once we have sorted out who the also-rans are going to be, I'd expect one of them to offer white-label-LLM-as-a-service customization, at which point even the smaller religions can probably get on board, along with regional burger chains and mere millionaires with bad ketamine habits.

  • AI with God complex (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Thursday October 30, 2025 @01:13AM (#65760508)

    Just what we need is an super-intelligent AI that fancies itself to be God.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      True, but is that worse than Trump and Musk fancying themselves to be God? Or a political apparatus that pushes that? It is only worse when the goal in creating the AI is to build a more malicious narcissism than even Trump or Musk. Difficult to imagine, likely unrecoverable.

      AI doesn't have agency, the threat is how such an AI would get wired in and Christians are the worst kind of human in that regard.

  • This should be quite amusing. Being unmoored from reality and coherence is especially liberating for AIs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I am not sure about that. LLMs cannot reason. Hence this may just be a different flavor of slop and entirely boring.

  • "... hasten the coming of Christ's return,"

    Holy crap. You know what that means, don't you.

    I suspect part of this is why Intel has moved so much of itself to Israel.

    • The end of sin and suffering? An eternity in the presence of God? An eternity of suffering in God's absence for those who chose to love sin instead?

  • They can call it Landru.

    Or since it needs so much power, call it Vaal.

  • It is funny how some think an Ai is a sort of oracle. Next they try to train the oracle to think in a particular way. This time, it is a Christian Ai. Next week, there is an Islamic Ai. Then a BBQ lover's Ai.
    In the end there are a plethora of Ais all saying different things. Babylon tower all over.
    Still quarreling about the truth, still violent conflicts to settle it all... There will be one big difference though. We will have a lot more nuclear power plants.
  • This is truly a dawn of a new era of stupidity.
    As believing in stupid things and performing the stupid ceremonies that stupid beliefs require has become tedious and time consuming we turn to AI to help us automate stupid beliefs and stupid ceremonies.
    With this new AI prayer service robots will be enabled to go about stupid activities so actual stupid people have more time to engage and deeply stupid things.
    Only a matter of time until every religion has their own AI helper running their own electric mo

    • Look at the evidence! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Thursday October 30, 2025 @04:56AM (#65760688)

      Given the vast number of highly intelligent Christians down the ages, your belief that we are all stupid is not justified by the facts; people far more intelligent than me or you have chosen to become Christians . A modern example is Lee Strobel who, as an investigative journalist with the Chicago Tribune looked at the evidence for Jesus' resurrection and ended up convinced. The resultant book, 'The Case for Christ' based on interviews with the leading scholars in the various fields, offers a solid argument.

      Enjoy!

      • Re:Look at the evidence! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday October 30, 2025 @07:23AM (#65760808)

        Strongly believing unverifiable things is not a sign of active intelligence. It is a sign of selective, chosen stupidity. The fundamental fault in your argument is that highly intelligent people apply that intelligence universally. Highly intelligent religious people are a nice example that demonstrates many do not. I call that "stupidity of the 2nd order" or lack of wisdom.

        IMO, this is even worse than when somebody is fundamentally stupid. Such a person cannot help it. But having the skills and choosing to not apply them is utterly pathetic.

        • The fact that an investigative journalist was convinced to change his opinion on Christianity by the evidence that he discovered should be significant to you. Is it realistic to merely assume that he stopped applying his journalistic skills? Or is it more realistic to accept that he found something that was solid evidence that he couldn't argue with?

          • What was this evidence?

            Can you summarize it?

            Why are you using an oblique appeal to an obscure authority's book rather than just simply saying "This is the evidence that proves it" ?
            (I think we can guess the answer to this question)

      • Bart Ehrman is a new testament scholar. He studied theology at a religious university and when he started looking at the new testament with a scholar's eye, putting the gospels next to each other line by line, sentence by sentence, he lost his faith. He believes it's likely that Jesus existed though.

        One remarkable thing is the end of the gospel according to Matthew where some monk in the middle ages added the resurrection to the text cause he couldn't understand why it was present in other gospels but missi

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Bad example. You should have picked Pascal or someone like him. (OTOH, I've got an extremely intelligent friend who believes in Big Foot. Intelligent people believe what they believe, but aren't always reasonable in their selection of the evidence they consider sound.)

    • People using LLMs as friends is bad enough, researchers worse, and to be their therapists and priests is dystopian. Do you even need an AI Spanish Inquisition if you can merely buy the company that feeds {denomination} and alter the algos they use to make it more amenable to your own sect?

  • Really? (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday October 30, 2025 @04:45AM (#65760686)

    AI's with delusions and hallucinations already exist.:-)

  • No doubt this AI will become the centrepiece of a tax free grift

  • And does so about pretty fundamental questions? Yes, checks out. How repulsive.

  • So now I need chatbots and AI assistants to fill my spiritual needs..... World has seriously gone nuts !!!
  • It would be better to make an LLM AI that was fed all the major philosophys and religious texts, a user could learn objectively from them, what this x-Intel exec seems to be making is an AI interactive bible which would only serve as a confirmation bias tool for religious nuts to brainwash thselvez & others
  • one lie sustaining another lie to fleece the gullable.

  • I really don't get why so many Americans still believe in god. Why hasn't rationality taken more of a hold?

  • Machines of loving Grace /s (Score:3)

    by Mirnotoriety ( 10462951 ) on Thursday October 30, 2025 @09:40AM (#65761048)
    I like to think of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. (sang to the tune of “I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing”)

    O Deep Thought computer, said the assembly of bewildered theologians, technologists, and slightly exasperated AI ethicists, the task we have designed you to perform is most urgent and singular: Calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Spiritual Artificial Intelligence infused with Christian principles.

    As Earth began its program to divine the Ultimate Question, it soon became clear that its subroutines had a peculiar habit of mixing divine prophecy with tech industry earnings calls, and while it sometimes accelerated the coming of Christ’s return by 0.00001%, it also skeptically noted that AI assistants trained on scripture tended to underperform when asked about existential dread but excelled at answering financial questions.

  • AI and religion (Score:3)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Thursday October 30, 2025 @10:51AM (#65761266) Homepage

    Cool! They finally found a field where the hallucinations are a feature, not a bug!

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