The former CEO of Intel, Pat Gelsinger, has just announced his next step in the technology space. Gelsinger's retirement from Intel last year was big news. After cutting his teeth at the company as an engineer, he was midway through leading Intel through its planned recovery campaign as CEO when he broke the news. As Tom's Hardware reports, now Gelsinger is back in the game, this time in charge of product development as executive chair and head of technology at Gloo.
We're not talking about that awesome gun from Prey. Gloo is a United States-based Christian faith-based technology company. It focuses on developing software suites for Church use with value-aligned AI, presumably as well as praying their products work. Essentially it's trying to be the Microsoft Office of the ministry, spreading the good Word.doc.
Gelsinger's not exactly new to Gloo. He's been attached to the company for almost ten years either as an investor or board member. The move will no doubt add Gelsinger's portrait as another in the lineup of old, white men, on the company's website.
"Effective today, I have been named Gloo's executive chair and head of technology," Pat Gelsinger writes on LinkedIn. "I have been involved with Gloo for almost 10 years, both as a board member and investor. Gloo's focus on creating a technology platform that connects and catalyzes the faith ecosystem perfectly aligns with my own sense of purpose."
Gelsinger's first big task at the company is to spearhead the development of vertical industry clouds for faith and advanced values-aligned AI. From his earlier comments, it's likely this will use DeepSeek, the Chinese-owned AI that Open AI was upset with over stealing its stolen data. Gelsinger has praised the platform for its affordability over Open AI. This is despite neither doing a great job at building a gaming computer when we last asked.
"Now more than ever, there is great need for faith-based communities to take an active role in ensuring we shape technology as a force for good," Gelsinger writes. "As we have seen with social media, the impact of technology evolutions is swift, deep and long lasting. AI is an even more powerful yet nascent tool. It is imperative we ensure AI is used to enhance the human experience, not harm it."
It's unlikely most of us will ever need to use Gloo's niche software, let alone any of its AI-powered tools but it does have me curious. We've shown AI can have clear bias depending on the data it was trained by, in that way it's as fallible and human as we are. Training one on the ideals of one faith or another feels like it could be a fast track to the singularity. If we start having AI's trained on religion I don't think we can be too surprised when one goes Old Testament on us.
