ChatGPT Mystery: Deceased OpenAI Whistleblower Had Been Approached to

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Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer who raised concerns about the company’s AI training practices potentially violating copyright law, was reportedly being considered as a key witness in lawsuits against OpenAI before he was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26.

The Guardian reports that Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former engineer at OpenAI, died on November 26, 2024 in what San Francisco police said appeared to be a suicide. Prior to his death, Balaji had been identified by lawyers as a potential star witness who likely had unique and relevant documents that could support allegations of copyright infringement against the AI company.

During his nearly four years at OpenAI before resigning in August 2024, Balaji played an essential role in developing some of the company’s key products, including WebGPT which paved the way for ChatGPT. Most recently, he had been organizing the massive datasets of online writings and media used to train GPT-4, OpenAI’s flagship large language model.

It was this work that led Balaji to publicly question in October 2024 whether OpenAI’s practices of training its AI systems on people’s data and then competing with them in the marketplace may be illegal copyright infringement. He told the Associated Press he would “try to testify” in the strongest copyright cases against the company, including one brought by the New York Times in 2023.

While acknowledging his was an unpopular opinion within the AI research community, Balaji felt pulling data from the internet to train AI without permission would have to change, telling AP “they will have to change and it’s a matter of time.” He had grown increasingly disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after internal turmoil in 2023 and the departures of key leaders.

Balaji resigned from OpenAI on the same day in August 2024 as his mentor John Schulman. With Balaji no longer available to testify, it’s unclear what impact his potential testimony could have had on the pending lawsuits accusing OpenAI of copyright violations. Lawyers involved in the cases declined to comment on what role Balaji might have played and how his death affects their litigation strategies.