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Vic Gundotra, a former Google executive who spearheaded foundational AI initiatives like Google Translate, after a career spent working alongside icons like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, a period of personal crisis led him on a spiritual journey from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to a conversion to the Catholic Church. He is a longtime Silicon Valley leader and also a former Microsoft executive.
Vic Gundotra spent his career at the pinnacle of the tech world. As a former Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, he was a pioneer who helped launch Google Search for mobile and witnessed the birth of neural networks like Google Translate. Yet, despite his front-row seat to the creation of the world’s most powerful technologies, it wasn’t a line of code that changed his life—it was a spiritual crisis that led him to the Catholic faith, aided by the very technology he helped build.
A Faith Reconstructed
Born in India and raised in the United States, Gundotra grew up in a strict Jehovah’s Witness household. His parents began with Hinduism then converted to become Jehovah Witness. "I was knocking on doors by the time I was six or seven years old," he recalls. For years, he lived by an exacting moral code, eventually serving at the faith’s headquarters in Brooklyn.
However, the same curiosity that fueled his success in Silicon Valley eventually led him to question his upbringing. Using the early internet of the late '90s, he began researching church doctrine in secret.
"I had spent all night researching using Google everything the book said, trying to find a flaw in it," Gundotra says.
This research eventually led him and his wife to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a move that cost them their social circles and strained family ties. Following this, Gundotra spent 15 years in a "spiritual desert" of atheism and agnosticism, convinced that if his childhood faith was wrong, perhaps all religion was a man-made construct.
The "Rock Bottom" Moment
Gundotra’s transition to Catholicism wasn't sparked by an intellectual debate, but by a personal low point. After the death of his father and a period of personal struggle, he reached out to a long-time friend and Catholic, Mark Ryland.
When Gundotra texted Ryland at 2:00 a.m., he was shocked to receive an immediate reply. Ryland wasn't just awake; he was at Eucharistic Adoration. This encounter opened the door to a two-year journey of discovery. Gundotra began reading the Early Church Fathers, discovering figures like St. Clement whose writings echoed the Catholic tradition rather than the doctrines he had been raised with.
AI: A New Window into the Word
Now a devout Catholic, Gundotra views Artificial Intelligence not as a threat to faith, but as one of the most profound tools ever granted to humanity—comparing its impact to the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel.
Today, his morning routine involves more than just reading the daily Mass scriptures; he uses AI to perform "deep research" into the texts. By asking AI tools like Gemini or ChatGPT to "tell me something most people miss about today's Mass readings," he has discovered layers of scriptural depth that he missed for decades.
The Case of the Leper
Gundotra shares a powerful example involving the story of Jesus healing the leper. By instructing the AI to "slow down" and perform recursive reasoning—a process that can take 20 minutes rather than seconds—the AI highlighted a startling connection in Leviticus 14.
| Element from Leviticus 14 | Symbolic Fulfillment in Christ |
| Cedar Wood / Wooden Stake | The Wood of the Cross |
| Hyssop | The branch used to give Jesus vinegar |
| Scarlet Yarn | The blood and sacrifice of Christ |
| Running (Living) Water | Baptism and the Holy Spirit |
| The Released Bird | The Resurrection and freedom from sin |
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