Former OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead From “Suicide” in San Francisco

A former researcher at OpenAI was found dead in his San Francisco apartment just months after he blew the whistle over alleged copyright violations by the company in developing its ChatGPT chatbot.

The San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said 26-year-old Suchir Balaji’s death has been ruled as a suicide.

26-year old OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, who accused the company of violating copyright law, has been found dead in an apparent suicide.

Below is a screenshot of his last post on X.

Elon Musk on @OpenAI:

“I don’t trust OpenAI. I started OpenAI as a non-profit open… pic.twitter.com/e9wbJqNBwc

— J Stewart (@triffic_stuff_) December 14, 2024

Officers from the San Francisco Police Department conducted a welfare check at Balaji’s apartment on November 26.

Upon inspection, the officer discovered a deceased adult male but reported no signs of foul play in their preliminary findings.

A month earlier, an article published in the New York Times highlighted Balaji’s concerns about the impact of AI technologies like ChatGPT on the profitability of creators and organizations supplying the data used for AI training.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told the outlet, adding that “this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”

Balaji left the company over the concerns.

As Mercury News reported, Its public release in late 2022 spurred a torrent of lawsuits against OpenAI from authors, computer programmers and journalists, who say the company illegally stole their copyrighted material to train its program and elevate its value past $150 billion.

Balaji voiced concern about his assignment of gathering data from the internet for the company’s GPT-4 program, which analyzed text from nearly the entire internet to train its artificial intelligence program.

According to Balaji, the practice violated the country’s “fair use” laws, and he posted an analysis on his personal website arguing that point.

Balaji wrote that no known factors “seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data,”

“That being said, none of the arguments here are fundamentally specific to ChatGPT either, and similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products in a wide variety of domains.”

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