OpenAI publishes Elon Musk’s emails. ‘We’re sad that it’s come to this’

OpenAI fired back at Elon Musk, who sued the ChatGPT company last week for chasing profit and diverging from its original, nonprofit mission. Tuesday night, OpenAI published several of Musk’s emails from the early days of the company that appear to show Musk acknowledging OpenAI needed to make a ton of money to fund the incredible computing resources needed to power its AI ambitions.

In the emails, parts of which have been redacted, Musk argues that the company stood virtually no chance of building a successful generative AI platform by raising cash alone, and the company needed to find alternate sources of revenue to survive.

In a November 22, 2015, email to CEO Sam Altman, Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, said the company needed to raise much more than $100 million to “avoid sounding hopeless.” Musk suggested a $1 billion funding commitment and promised that he would cover whatever did not get raised.(...)