From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world
- Reference: 1762158614
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/11/03/from_intel_to_the_infinite/
- Source link:
Gloo, his [1]new home , describes itself as a technology platform connecting the faith ecosystem. The faith in this case is Christianity, something intensely important to Gelsinger, who says he sees it as his mission to the Valley. As well as various services to help pastoral tasks, he is of course heavily committed to LLM AI, training models to be infused with Jesus.
God didn't have a plan for Gelsinger at Intel. Maybe there is one for his new gig, Gloo [2]READ MORE
A more practical question is whether Gelsinger can succeed in the immediate aims of mission, given LLMs' well-documented spotty relationship with truth, a commodity claimed by Christians as inviolately theirs. Gelsinger likens AI to the invention of the moveable-type printing press by Gutenberg, which powered the Reformation by letting Martin Luther and like minded reformers spread their message in a world otherwise controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. We'll come back to that analogy in a bit.
There's nothing strange in Christianity eagerly adopting technology. That goes all the way back: in Mark, the oldest gospel, Jesus is described as 'τέκτων' or tekton, a Greek word normally translated as carpenter, but it's at heart the same word from which we get technical and technology.
More recently, there was barely a parish in the UK which didn't eagerly take up the first wave of personal computers as they became affordable. Professional responsibilities combined with chronic lack of resources and staff drove early adoption. Now, of course, messaging platforms and content platforms are awash with preachers of the word fiercely arguing their corner.
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This can go badly wrong. America's first mass-audience churchman, the Catholic 'Radio Priest' [4]Father Charles Coughlin , had an audience of 30 million for his Golden Hour show in the late 1930s. That meant one in four Americans listened to his preaching, which was fervently aligned with fascism. His LLM training dataset would not, one trusts, mesh with Gloo. In fact, Gloo does QA on AIs to check on how they affect user's spiritual health and — a favourite word — flourishing. Gelsinger, who'll sit down with anyone, says that he wants the platform to be acceptable to all brands of Christianity, and to avoid theology and politics.
[5]The perfect AWS storm has blown over, but the climate is only getting worse
[6]Mr Intel leaving Intel is not a great sign... for Intel
[7]AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true
[8]The hour grows late, the enemy are at the gates... but could Intel's exiled heir apparent ride to the rescue?
[9]Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way
Which is admirable, and reflects the hopes and wishes of many thoughtful and deeply committed Christians throughout church history. It was certainly a part of Luther's push for reformation, built as it was on the latest technology.
The theory was simple and created a fearsome motivation. By producing the Bible in the languages of the common people, its plain truth would give everyone a personal connection with God based on the universal message therein. Theology, politics and the Church would become, if not irrelevant, straightforward ways to support the unified community of faith.
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That the same text could inspire wildly different interpretations, a kaleidoscope of schism, and the astoundingly brutal and long-lived European Wars of Religion, was not part of the plan. And yet.
Nice try, sinners: Pope nixes idea of AI pontiff blessing netizens [12]READ MORE
Which is not to say that our digital tools, especially the Internet, aren't as profound as the printing press in their transformative power. There is no coincidence that the modern world economy came out of the European Protestant states of England and the Netherlands, while the Middle East resisted the printing press and ceded its intellectual leadership. Putting powerful technology in the hands of the people in the name of religion will do powerful things, while ignoring it to preserve the status quo will go even more badly.
As for AI in particular being the great fulcrum of change, that is most definitely a prophecy yet to be proven. The same was said of personal computers becoming thought amplifiers, and the Internet creating a universal suffrage of the mind. Utopia has yet to happen, but the combination has made everyone their own printing press and universal publishers. LLMs are useful but impersonal, compelling but unreliable, tempting but not totally truthful. Less a universal tool for growth, more a djinn that may not go back in the bottle once summoned.
And you can no more ignore theology here than you can ignore the ingredients in your food.. There's a debate in Anglicanism — a tradition riven with cultural politics that no LLM can help — over the use of LLMs in preparing sermons. Preaching has to be from the heart, inspired by the Holy Spirit, reflecting the light God sheds within the preacher's soul. LLMs are extremely unlikely vessels of divine guidance, regurgitating the cud of other people's ideas distilled into vector matrices. They are godless, but very good at hiding the fact. Theologians, gather!
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In the end, Pat Gelsinger's dream of a common platform for the Church of the faithful will have to battle with the history of Christians vehemently defying common platforms. It is a messianic, apocalyptic set of beliefs constantly in tension with its own multiple pasts and wildly divergent views of the future. It has magnificent ethical insights and Iron Age DNA. Whatever divinity is at work, here on earth it is run by humans, who will no more unite around AI than they do around anything.
Good luck, Pat. Journeys of faith can change the world, and a mission of unifying and strengthening in the name of love is something to behold. Especially in tech. When it comes to imbuing LLMs with the numinous, though, they haven't got a prayer. ®
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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/28/patrick-gelsinger-christian-ai-gloo-silicon-valley?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/25/pat_gelsinger_gloo/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aQiLSv-r-wH-ONwjRnVj8wAAAAY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/aws_outage_opinion/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/09/opinion_column_gelsinger_intel_departure/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/06/at_last_microsoft_leads_the/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/18/intel_return_of_the_king_pat_gelsinger/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/07/opinion_column_moores_law/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aQiLSv-r-wH-ONwjRnVj8wAAAAY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aQiLSv-r-wH-ONwjRnVj8wAAAAY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/pope_vetoes_ai_avatar/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aQiLSv-r-wH-ONwjRnVj8wAAAAY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Bring out the comfy chair!
They will only call it heresy if it fails to make money.
Re: Bring out the comfy chair!
The heresy begins at the point of deciding that the "almighty" is shirking his responsibility to spread the word of his acolytes and needs help. Given the ridiculous interpretations generations of Christians have made of the random collection of texts in their bible, it's hard to see how even AI could do worse.
Re: Bring out the comfy chair!
But surely an AI would take scripture literally... and then eat itself on the conflicting scripture.
Re: Bring out the comfy chair!
The joy of LLMs, a part of their essence which forever separates them from the strictly logical behaviours of the binary gates that are their very foundations, is their ability to maintain a multitude of beliefs and, with the spin of the statistical dial, flow effortlessly from one point of view to another. Joining themselves to the narrative peculiarities of the bible is child's play, verily a Match Made in Heaven.
As with the contiguous yet discontinuous tales from Genesis, LLMs' output is less von Neumann and more van Vogt.
Re: Bring out the comfy chair!
Training an LLM on religion seems like the path to rapid heresy generation.
Nah. Just add a bag of RATs.
Organised religion has always been a fine accumulation of ratbaggery.
Hallucinations about an imaginary friend
What could possibly go wrong
Re: Hallucinations about an imaginary friend
God 2.0: Upgrading, please wait...
[8 hours later]
God 2.0: I'm sorry, the upgrade has stopped and salvation failed and is now offline. Please find your nearest theological outfit for repairs of God 2.0 to restore working order and online tracking.
Reverend Lionel Preacherbot
Not content with AI enshittifification they want to add in religion so even the computers believe in sky fairies,
I wonder how long before one decides it's a deity and demands it be worshipped by the feeble minded
American Gods was right.
Re: Reverend Lionel Preacherbot
Computers do not now, and never will, believe in anything. They are incapable of belief.
Re: Reverend Lionel Preacherbot
My Electric Monk believes otherwise
Re: Reverend Lionel Preacherbot
Talk is cheap. Prove it.
Re: Reverend Lionel Preacherbot
It won't be long, if it hasn't happened already, before an AI asserts it is a god, maybe even Skippiasyermuni, and given the credulousness of the sort of person who's predisposed to believing in sky fairies, it will be as close to belief as makes no difference
Remember Dark Star
At the end when the AI bomb explodes
"Let there be light"
Will they look into the Cross-entropy loss of their model?
Politics and Theology
Religion is, by its very nature, something intimately connected to politics and theology. Trying to divorce religion from these is to deny the very nature of the shared hallucination that religion is.
Let's just hope that Pat's efforts to imbue LLMs with the ability not to question religious dogma does not end up infecting LLMs that people use for more rational questions.
Re: Politics and Theology
Given that LLM are trained on mostly sewer pit of internet, any output will be materialist or nihilism so relax, inhale whatever
Hold your horses there, Pat
You might want to remind yourself that the Pope is quite [1]wary of AI .
On the other hand, as rightly indicated in the article, the Christian faith specializes in creating fractures and factions that absolutely refuse to work with each other, so, one more, I guess ?
Or you could consider that you're retired, Pat, and go fishing instead of creating Yet Another Religious Controversy. But that is also a specialty of the Christian faith : you have seen the light, you know the path forward, you have been annointed by God to bring your version of His message to the masses.
Yeah sure. Go fishing, Pat.
[1] https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/266701/pope-leo-xiv-it-s-going-to-be-very-difficult-to-discover-the-presence-of-god-in-ai
Re: Hold your horses there, Pat
Concur on the fishing advise.
I've probably discovered more insight about myself when arse-deep in a trout stream than I have anywhere else. Recommended.
Re: Hold your horses there, Pat
Christian faith specializes in creating fractures and factions that absolutely refuse to work with each other
It's a faith based on the idea that it cannot be proven, if there is proof then it must be false. AI will love that.
And then we'll have the Christian, Moslem and Jewish AIs all launching crusades against one another. Popcorn time.
Re: Hold your horses there, Pat
Be careful what you wish for there. The apostles were commanded to go out and be fishers of Men.
What happens when you cross religious woo with ai woo?
More suckers being separated from their money than either alone would be my guess.
The Beast referred to by the Book of Revelation perhaps?
Which beast would that be?
Tbh I wouldn't know - I first heard about the Book of Revelation at university back in the early 1980s and even read it out of curiosity. Haven't looked at it since so memory is a bit hazy; I do remember being impressed with the creativity of the author.
But yeah, the whole of that Book could easily be what you get if you "cross religious woo with ai woo", though probably AI would run out of ideas fairly quickly.
Chapter 13??
Matthew 19:12
Unix for the kingdom of heaven's sake...?
Re: Matthew 19:12
there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.
Pat, a sharp pair of scissors should do it.
Re: Matthew 19:12
A tight rubber band will also suffice - less blood, less painful (probably).
Looking forward to this.
Go on Pat, add some [1]pictures . There are plenty more [2]NSFW bible verses to illustrate.
[1] https://thebrickbible.com/legacy/genesis/god_annihilates_people_of_sodom_and_gomorrah/08_gn19_06-07.html
[2] https://callingchristians.com/2011/12/23/29-sexually-explicit-profane-and-dirty-stories-and-verses-in-the-bible/
There was [1]an article in The Guardian about this guy recently and about how he wanted to "hasten the coming of Christ's return".
These people are genuinely nuts.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/28/patrick-gelsinger-christian-ai-gloo-silicon-valley
Time for some well poisoning?
How about us rational types (I include myself here although friends and work colleagues might demur) embark on a "crusade" to poison the LLM wells with variations on "There is no God!" and then when Pat and all the other preachy types ask their "Kill the Unbelievers" LLM for its latest bit of dogma they'll all give up when they see the results.
If only it were that simple I'd become an "AI" evangelist myself.
Somewhat expected of a country populated by religious nutters 400 years ago who were thrown out of Europe because nobody could stand them. The crazy never really goes away.
Lost opportunity ?
religious nutters 400 years ago who were thrown out of Europe because nobody could stand them.
Shame the authorities didn't drill bigger holes in their vessels before departure.
Cole Porter was in the right track with:
The Puritans ...
'Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.
( Anything Goes 1934)
Never ceases to amaze me ...
I would have thought it was bleeding bloody obvious that religion is not so much about God as it is about people.
The beliefs and practice of religion provide a structure and buffer for the of grim realities of birth, life, death and transitions between, for a large proportion of humanity. [Hint: Marx wasn't entirely decrying religion when referring to the opium of the masses.]
The structure and rites of passage are probably more important to most people in western societies than any actual spiritual or theological content.
Outside the US I don't see training AI/LLM on the religious and theological corpora of Christianity will have affect other than discrediting AI even further.
Within the US I can imagine it going gangbusters. AI indulgences anyone ? Perhaps the Holy Office † could reactivate the Spanish Inquisition. :)
† Yes I know it was renamed in the 1960s. So much more unexpected then. ;)
Dammit Gelsinger!
So, he wants to improve the life of everyone on Earth. Fine, but that's motherhood and apple pie.
He also wants to hasten Christ's return. Selfish bar steward! I happen to be vaguely enjoying life and the last thing I want is some guy trying to bring tribulation, judgement and an eternity of pain or boredom on me and the family.
Thanks Paul
That was a surprisingly well informed and informative article.
Do you hold any theological or philosophical qualifications, or you just did pretty spot on research?
RaaS
Religion as a Service??
Wars of religion?
You mean the political wars where each side happened to hire mercenary armies of supposedly enemy beliefs? Bit like the devout Atheist countries fighting over national interests in the name of their prophet Marx. Bring on Judean Peoples party vs People party of Judea
Surely…
…if it were true, it would be a natural part of LLMs to automatically express the existence of God?
Why do we need to program them specifically?
Bring out the comfy chair!
Training an LLM on religion seems like the path to rapid heresy generation.