Geoffrey Hinton, Chief scientist, told Fortune in a statement. “As one of the first companies to publish A.I. principles, we remain committed to a responsible approach to A.I. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”

Hinton did not immediately return Fortune’s request for comment.

A.I.’s ‘pivotal moment’
Hinton began his career as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh in 1972. That’s where he first started his work on neural networks, mathematical models that roughly mimic the workings of the human brain and are capable of analyzing vast amounts of data.

His neural network research was the breakthrough concept behind a company he built with two of his students called DNNresearch, which Google ultimately bought in 2013. Hinton won the 2018 Turing Award—the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in the computing world—with his two other colleagues (one of whom was Bengio) for their neural network research, which has been key to the creation of technologies including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot.

As one of the key thinkers in A.I., Hinton sees the current moment as “pivotal” and ripe with opportunity. In an interview with CBS in March, Hinton said he believes that A.I. innovations are outpacing our ability to control it—and that’s a cause for concern.

“It’s very tricky things. You don’t want some big for-profit companies to decide what is true,” he told CBS Mornings in an interview in March. “Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose A.I. And now I think it may be 20 years or less.”

Hinton added that we could be close to computers being able to come up with ideas to improve themselves. “That’s an issue, right? We have to think hard about how you control that.”

Hinton said that Google is going to be a lot more careful than Microsoft when it comes to training and presenting A.I.-powered products and cautioning users about the information shared by chatbots. Google has been at the helm of A.I. research for a long time—well before the recent generative A.I. wave caught on. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, has famously likened A.I. to other innovations that have shaped humankind.

“I’ve always thought of A.I. as the most profound technology humanity is working on—more profound than fire or electricity or anything that we’ve done in the past,” Pichai said in an interview aired in April. Just like humans learned to skillfully harness fire despite its dangers, Pichai thinks humans can do the same with A.I.

“It gets to the essence of what intelligence is, what humanity is,” Pichai said. “We are developing technology which, for sure, one day will be far more capable than anything we’ve ever seen before.”