Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill. Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill. Google CEO Sundar Pichai made his public debut before Congress on Tuesday, spending much of his testimony countering Republicans' allegations of anti-conservative bias in the company's search results. He also faced scrutiny of how much data Google collects on users and on the company's work on a censored search tool for China. Time and again, Republican lawmakers pressed Pichai on allegations of political bias in search results on Google and its video subsidiary YouTube.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is the latest high profile figure to warn about the dangers of artificial intelligence. In an interview with Recode and MSNBC set to air Jan. 26, Pichai likened AI to fire: dangerous, but useful. Pichai said the technology was important but that caution was necessary. Pichai made the comments during a taped segment of "Revolution: Google and YouTube Changing the World," a joint endeavor between Recode and MSNBC. "AI is one of the most important things that humanity is working on," Pichai said.

The Google CEO was told in a recent interview that Musk had weighed in on the company's new Google Clips camera, which uses artificial intelligence to capture photos automatically, and the Tesla CEO wasn't exactly a fan. Musk, who's spoken before about the problems such super-smart systems pose, said Clips "doesn't even seem innocent," an assessment Pichai responded to rather diplomatically. "He's a deep thinker about problems, and I think it's right to be concerned about A.I.," Pichai told Bloomberg in an interview published Thursday. He went on to say that because society can't press the pause button on tech advancements, Google's role is to be a "thoughtful and ethical" steward. "None of us have answers yet, which is what Elon is pointing out."