SAN FRANCISCO - ChatGPT maker OpenAI responded to a lawsuit filed against it by Mr Elon Musk in a blog post on March 5 – saying he signed off on the company’s decision to become a for-profit entity and that he insisted it needed to raise “billions” of dollars to be relevant compared with Google.

Mr Musk filed the lawsuit last week against OpenAI, chief executive officer Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman, alleging the start-up had strayed from its mission to build responsible artificial intelligence (AI) and that it had become beholden to Microsoft, its largest investor. In the post, OpenAI said Mr Musk was lashing out after trying and failing to make the company part of Tesla.

“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired – someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” the company said in the post, which was co-authored by several of OpenAI’s co-founders, including Mr Altman, Mr Brockman and Mr Ilya Sutskever.

The post also reproduced e-mails Mr Musk had sent to people at the company, demonstrating that the billionaire had endorsed OpenAI’s fundraising efforts. “This needs billions per year immediately or forget it,” Mr Musk wrote in one e-mail, according to OpenAI.

OpenAI, as a non-profit, raised less than US$45 million from Mr Musk and more than US$90 million from other donors, according to the blog post. Mr Musk pushed the company to be far more ambitious in its fund raising, the e-mails show.

At the outset, Mr Altman and Mr Brockman planned to raise US$100 million, OpenAI said in the post.

Mr Musk wrote in an e-mail cited by the start-up: “We need to go with a much bigger number than US$100 million to avoid sounding hopeless relative to what Google or Facebook are spending.

“I think we should say that we are starting with a US$1 billion funding commitment... I will cover whatever anyone else doesn’t provide.”

Mr Musk had also signed off on the idea that OpenAI would not build open-source software for artificial general intelligence, and that it would not always share the science behind its technological advances, according to OpenAI.

Mr Sutskever wrote in a 2016 e-mail cited by the start-up: “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open.

“The ‘open’ in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it is built, but it’s totally okay to not share the science.”

In his response, Mr Musk replied: “Yup.”

In the blog post, the OpenAI co-founders said Mr Musk had not always been opposed to corporate influence at OpenAI. They said Mr Musk had written in an e-mail: “Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero.”

Mr Musk is suing the start-up for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and claims of unfair business practices, among other grievances. He is bringing the suit in the capacity of a donor to the non-profit parent organisation as recently as 2019, and is seeking to force OpenAI to stop benefiting Microsoft and Mr Altman personally.

Co-authoring the blog post marks a return to public view for Mr Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a former OpenAI board member, who had voted to oust Mr Altman in November but later recanted his decision to help fire him. BLOOMBERG