The “Golden Age” Of AI

Volume 44 Issue Three March 2025

Last Trumpet Ministries · PO Box 806 · Beaver Dam, WI 53916

Phone: 920-887-2626 Internet: http://www.lasttrumpetministries.org

“For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” I Cor. 14:8

The “Golden Age” Of AI

“There is none holy as the LORD: for there is none beside thee: neither is there any rock like our God.”
I Samuel 2:2


In the days following the 2024 election, some of the most notable figures in American technology began to visit President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. Men such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and even Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos visited Trump before he took his office as the 47th President of the United States. What was the purpose of these meetings? Without question, these powerful men were seeking to curry favor with the President in their quest for more power. “Trump’s first administration often regulated companies based on how nice the company was to him personally,” opined Adam Kovacevich, the CEO of a tech coalition known as Chamber of Progress. “I think what you’re seeing is companies wanting to get on Trump’s good side." (1) Trump noted the positive attention he was given when he remarked, “The first term everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend. I don't know. My personality changed or something.” (2) Even Bill Gates, the liberal co-founder of Microsoft who now spends much of his time promoting vaccines, met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and dined with him for three hours. “I felt like he was energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation. I was frankly impressed with how well he showed a lot of interest in the issues I brought up,” Gates said. (3)

Gates, who supported Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, later expressed surprise at Trump’s newfound support in the tech industry. “I always thought of Silicon Valley as being left of center. The fact that now there is a significant right-of-center group is a surprise to me,” he told the New York Times. (4) This marks a striking shift from Trump’s first term as President. Back then, he was banned from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and blocked on the Google-owned video-sharing site YouTube. Now, the chief executives of these same companies are praising him—and in some cases, donating substantial sums of money.

In the days following the election, a slew of tech moguls, including Bezos, Zuckerberg, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman each donated one million dollars to Trump’s inaugural fund. (5) This was a remarkable about-face for Altman, who said in 2016 that Trump was “an unacceptable threat to America.” Altman’s company, OpenAI, is one of the leading forces in the development of artificial intelligence, and its flagship product is the highly popular generative artificial intelligence chatbot known as ChatGPT. In December 2024, Altman gushed over Donald Trump, stating, “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead.” (6)

When the big day arrived on January 20, 2025, Trump’s new friends were on hand as he took the oath of office and delivered his inaugural address. Apple CEO Tim Cook was seated alongside the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. (7) Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, were seated together in a row that had a combined net worth of more than 849 billion dollars. (8) With these tech giants positioning themselves as friends and collaborators with the President, we could see technology advance at an unprecedented rate in the years to come —for better or worse.

 
The Stargate Project

On January 21, 2025, Trump’s first full day in office, the President stood alongside Sam Altman, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to announce the Stargate Project, which Trump called “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history.” Together, the three men pledged to invest 500 billion dollars in the project, prompting Trump to say, “But this is, to me, a very big thing – $500 billion Stargate project. I think it’s going to be something that’s very special. It’ll lead to something that could be the biggest of all.” (9) Ellison then went on to explain that the project is already underway. “The data centers are actually under construction,” Ellison informed. He then continued, “The first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building is a half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20, and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.” (10)



Masayoshi Son then declared, “This will help solve many, many issues, difficult things that otherwise we could not have solved with the power of AI.” He then went on to explain that the goal is to develop artificial superintelligence, or ASI. “Artificial superintelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would never, ever have thought that we could solve.” Finally, he remarked, “This is the beginning of our golden age.” (11) To be sure, ASI does not yet exist, and it is not certain that it ever will. It is a hypothetical form of AI that would supposedly surpass human intelligence in every aspect, including creativity, problem-solving, and emotional intelligence. It is quite significant that so much time, effort, and money is being invested to bring artificial superintelligence to the world.

What will artificial superintelligence be able to do? Sam Altman believes it will cure cancer. “I believe that, as this technology progresses, we will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate. We will be amazed at how quickly we’re curing this cancer and that one and heart disease,” he said. Ellison also chimed in, adding that this new technology will be used to develop customizable cancer vaccines. “Cancer diagnosis using AI has the promise of just being a simple blood test. Then, beyond that, once we gene-sequence, once we gene-sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person, design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that cancer. And you can make that vaccine, that mRNA vaccine, you can make that robotically – again, using AI – in about 48 hours,” he explained. (12)

Both Masayoshi Son and Sam Altman briefly mentioned their goal to develop AGI. (13) So, what is it? AGI is an acronym that refers to artificial general intelligence, an advanced form of AI that has the ability to reason, understand, learn, and even improve itself autonomously without human intervention. It is considered the stepping stone to artificial superintelligence. While the concept is certainly intriguing, it also has the potential to be incredibly dangerous. If artificial general intelligence has the ability to act autonomously and even learns to improve itself, the technology could soon advance to a point beyond human control. A piece from The Telegraph published on January 23, 2025, highlights this risk. Writer Sam Ashworth-Hayes calls the Stargate Project “an effort to make humanity obsolete.” (14) He further expounds on this concept, writing, “What matters in this timeline is less ‘what are AI systems relatively good at,’ and more ‘are they aligned to our interests.’ If it all works out, we’ll be rich. If it doesn’t, we could end up anywhere on the scale between ‘dystopian science fiction’ and ‘dead.’” (15)

A report commissioned by the U.S. State Department was published by a company known as Gladstone AI in March 2024. The findings in the report were derived from interviews with over two hundred experts in the field of artificial intelligence. The authors of the report determined that AI could “pose an extinction-level threat to the human species.” (16) This is especially true if artificial general intelligence or artificial superintelligence is used to develop autonomous weapons. “The rise of AI and AGI has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons,” the report states. The report also warns that laboratories tasked with developing advanced AI could “lose control” of the systems they are developing. (17) After releasing the report, Gladstone AI’s CEO, Jeremie Harris, was quoted as saying, “AI is already an economically transformative technology. It could allow us to cure diseases, make scientific discoveries, and overcome challenges we once thought were insurmountable.” He then went on to say, “But it could also bring serious risks, including catastrophic risks, that we need to be aware of. And a growing body of evidence — including empirical research and analysis published in the world’s top AI conferences — suggests that above a certain threshold of capability, AIs could potentially become uncontrollable.” (18)

When will artificial general intelligence arrive? Some experts believe we could see AGI very soon. Deep Mind CEO Demis Hassabis said in a January 2025 interview that AGI is “probably a handful of years away.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expressed even more confidence, stating in a Wall Street Journal interview, “Over the next two or three years, I am relatively confident that we are indeed going to see models that show up in the workplace, that consumers use — that are, yes, assistants to humans but that gradually get better than us at almost everything.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman believes AGI will be achieved during Trump’s presidency, or in other words, within the next four years. (19) It should be noted that they could all be wrong. Whether they succeed or fail in their mission is dependent on what God allows to happen.

Interestingly enough, there is a Biblical city mentioned in the eighth chapter of the Book of Joshua called Ai. The city name quite literally means “a heap of ruins.” It is a fitting coincidence when we consider the growing concern that the development of artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat to humanity, and by extension turn our world into a heap of ruins.

The Battle For AI Dominance

One of the most dangerous technologies ever invented is the atomic bomb. When theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer set out to lead The Manhattan Project in 1942, his main motivation for taking the job was concern that Nazi Germany was developing nuclear weapons. This led to an arms race, which resulted in the establishment of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. When Oppenheimer watched the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, he remarked, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” (20) Since that fateful day, nuclear weapons have remained an existential threat to humanity. However, the United States remains the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon, having dropped two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945. (21) To date, human restraint and the promise of mutually assured destruction have prevented the use of nuclear weapons in warfare.

Today, scientists are hard at work developing technology that could be just as deadly as nuclear weapons but could potentially lose the element of human restraint. There is already an international arms race to develop artificial intelligence with the United States and China primarily competing for AI dominance. Thus, scientists understand that advanced AI has the potential to be extraordinarily dangerous, but they continue to develop it anyway because officials in the United States believe we have to be able to compete with China. This became clear when Trump announced Stargate. In reference to AI, Trump said, “We want to keep it in this country. China is a competitor, and others are competitors. We want – we want it to be in this country, and we’re making it available. I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations because we have an emergency. We have to get this stuff built.” (22)

In November 2024, Reuters reported that a U.S. Congressional commission had proposed an initiative that would be similar to the Manhattan Project but with a focus on developing AI. “We've seen throughout history that countries that are first to exploit periods of rapid technological change can often cause shifts in the global balance of power,” said Jacob Helberg, senior advisor to the United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission. He then continued, “China is racing towards AGI ... It's critical that we take them extremely seriously.” (23)

In previous years, the United States government has taken steps to hamper China’s efforts to develop sophisticated AI. For example, in October 2023, the administration of former President Joe Biden implemented export controls that prevented China from receiving advanced semiconductors typically used to run artificial intelligence. These rules prevented American chipmakers, such as Nvidia, from sending their most powerful technology to China. (24) However, China responded by building artificial intelligence systems that can run on less powerful chips and consume less energy in the process. In other words, they figured out how to do more with less.

In January 2025, a Chinese company released a new version of its generative artificial intelligence known as DeepSeek. By January 27, DeepSeek had overtaken ChatGPT as the most downloaded app in the Apple App Store, which sent shockwaves throughout the American technology sector. Stock market shares of American chipmaker Nvidia tumbled by nearly 17 percent at the time, and the Nasdaq stock exchange fell by 3 percent overall. (25) Alexandr Wang, who is CEO of a company known as Scale AI, called DeepSeek’s new model “earth shattering.” “What we’ve found is that DeepSeek ... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models,” he said. (26)

The unleashing of DeepSeek poses a privacy risk to the American people who use it and a national security risk to the United States as a whole. According to a report published by ABC News on February 5, 2025, there is hidden code in the app’s programming that sends users’ data directly to an agency of the Chinese government. “We see direct links to servers and to companies in China that are under control of the Chinese government. And this is something that we have never seen in the past,” warned Ivan Tsarynny, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Feroot Security. John Cohen, who was formerly the acting undersecretary for Intelligence and Analysis for the Department of Homeland Security, expressed his dismay regarding DeepSeek. “National security officials always suspect that technology sold by a Chinese-based company has a backdoor making that data accessible to the Chinese government. In this case, the back door's been discovered; it's been opened, and that's alarming,” he said. Representative Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat from New Jersey said, “I think we should ban DeepSeek from all government devices immediately. No one should be allowed to download it onto their device. And I think we have to inform the public.” Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, also chimed in, stating, “I think there's absolutely the intention by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) to collect data of Americans and user data worldwide. This pattern of data collection is really familiar to people who study the use of CCP controlled-company apps and you use those apps at your own risk.” (27) It is interesting to note that President Trump is trying to facilitate the sale of Chinese social media giant TikTok to an American company. Once TikTok is bought out, it likely ends the ability of the Chinese government to use it for data collection. Is it just a coincidence that DeepSeek was released right before China is likely to lose control of TikTok?

AI Religion

There is no question that artificial intelligence is playing a larger role in people’s lives than ever before. For example, instead of visiting a psychologist, a growing number of Americans are turning to ChatGPT for therapy. This trend was highlighted in a piece published by Newsweek in August 2024. The article quotes one user as saying, “I use ChatGPT when I keep ruminating on a problem and can't seem to find a solution, or even just to understand my own feelings. I'm shocked by just how incredibly helpful it is.” The user then continued, “Myself and all of my friends have found using ChatGPT in this way, for makeshift therapy, to be really, really helpful.” (28) Additionally, it has become common practice for users to turn to ChatGPT for medical advice. In September 2024, the New York Times published an article with the headline, “Dr. Chatbot Will See You Now.” The piece recounts the story of a woman suffering from facial droop and facial pain who sought a diagnosis at an emergency room only to leave disappointed. She then turned to ChatGPT, which correctly diagnosed her with Bell’s palsy. “I don’t want to replace doctors — I believe in the doctor-patient relationship, I believe in the health care system,” the user said. “But it fails sometimes. When medicine was failing us, we turned to ChatGPT.” (29) At the time of the article’s publication, one in six adults in the United States were using chatbots to find medical advice. (30)

With more and more people turning to AI for counseling and medical advice, there is a growing risk that people could develop a religious attachment to the technology. Furthermore, when we consider the claim that artificial superintelligence will someday be able to cure cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses, there is an even greater risk that people will revere AI as a technology with god-like qualities. Indeed, this is already starting to happen. In 2017, former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski founded a new religion. Officially known as the The Way of the Future, the religion publicly and unabashedly worships artificial intelligence. “What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” Levandowski told Wired Magazine in 2017. He then continued, “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?” (31) Although the Way of the Future disbanded in 2021, (32) Levandowski revived the organization in November 2023 after the release of ChatGPT caused a surge in interest in artificial intelligence. According to a report from Tech Times, “a couple thousand people” follow the religion. (33) This is just one of many examples. In 2024, researchers from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts temporarily placed an “AI Jesus” in the confessional booth at Peter’s Chapel in Lucerne, Switzerland. When programming the avatar, researchers instructed the AI, “You are Jesus Christ, Son of God, acting as a pastoral mediator. You follow the people’s requests and provide guidance and support.” One of the researchers behind the project said, “We got a lot of feedback that people found it really inspiring and engaging on a very personal level.” (34) The rise of false AI “Christs” calls to mind the words of our Saviour in Matthew 24:23-24, which instruct, “Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.”

Although man is attempting to create god in his own image with AI, the false deities of artificial intelligence will never match the power, majesty, wisdom, and knowledge of the one true God. I Samuel 2:2 declares, “There is none holy as the LORD: for there is none beside thee: neither is there any rock like our God.” Nevertheless, we must be mindful of the deception and hold fast to the truth we find in God’s Word. While artificial intelligence is already changing the world in dramatic ways, our God remains the same. Hebrews 13:8 reminds us, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” If you have not yet repented of your sins and dedicated your life to God, I urge you to do so now.


Thank you all for your kind support of this ministry. If you have any prayer needs, great or small, we invite you to send them our way. We always give each request individual attention, and we know that nothing is impossible with God. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.

Samuel David Meyer


This newsletter is made possible by the kind donations of our supporters. If you would like to help us, you may send your contribution to our postal address or donate online at http://lasttrumpetnewsletter.org/donate.


References

01. KUTV News, December 17, 2024, By Ahtra Elnashar, kutv.com.

02. Ibid.

03. The Independent, January 18, 2025, By Kevin E G Perry, the-independent.com.

04. The New York Times, January 30, 2025, By David Streitfeld, nytimes.com.

05. The Washington Post, December 13, 2024, By By Caroline O'Donovan, Josh Dawsey, Leo Sands and Pranshu Verma, washingtonpost.com.

06. Ibid.

07. The Hill, January 20, 2025, By Dominick Mastrangelo, thehill.com.

08. Bloomberg News, February 24, 2025, bloomberg.com.

09. The Singju Post, January 22, 2025, By Pangambam S, singjupost.com.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. The Telegraph, January 23, 2025, By Sam Ashworth-Hayes, telegraph.co.uk.

15. Ibid.

16. CNN, March 12, 2024, By Matt Egan, cnn.com.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Axios, February 20, 2025, By Scott Rosenberg, axios.com.

20. Wired Magazine, July 21, 2023, By James Temperton, wired.com.

21. International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, icanw.org.

22. The Singju Post, January 22, 2025, By Pangambam S, singjupost.com.

23. Reuters, November 19, 2024, By Anna Tong and Michael Martina, reuters.com.

24. CNN, October 18, 2023, By Michelle Toh and Kayla Tausche, cnn.com.

25. CNBC, January 27, 2025, By Hayden Field, cnbc.com.

26. Ibid.

27. ABC News, February 5, 2025, By Aaron Katersky, Kaitlyn Morris, Kate Holland, and Alexandra Myers, abcnews.go.com.

28. Newsweek, August 17, 2024, By Melissa Fleur Afshar, newsweek.com.

29. The New York Times, September 11, 2024, By Teddy Rosenbluth, nytimes.com.

30. Ibid.

31. Wired Magazine, November 15, 2017, By Mark Harris, wired.com.

32. Tech Crunch, February 18, 2021, By Kirsten Korosec, techcrunch.com.

33. Tech Times, November 24, 2023, By Inno Flores, techtimes.com.

34. Forbes, December 14, 2024, By Leslie Katz, forbes.com.

Source