OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji found dead in US

A 26-year-old Indian-American researcher, Suchir Balaji, who was an ex-employee at OpenAI reportedly died by suicide in his San Francisco apartment, the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said.

Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov 26 and his death has been ruled a suicide with no evidence of foul play, the police officials confirmed.

"The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the decedent as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The manner of death has been determined to be suicide," an official was quoted as saying in a statement to TechCrunch.

In October, the former OpenAI employee raised concerns about the company breaking copyright law and publicly criticized the company's practices in an interview with The New York Times.

Balaji left OpenAI in August after four years and was quite vocal about using copyrighted materials to train generative AI models like ChatGPT.

“I recently participated in a New York Times story about fair use and generative AI, and why I’m sceptical ‘fair use’ would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I believe this,” Balaji had written on X on Oct 24.

In another interview with the New York Times, Balaji described OpenAI’s approach to data collection as harmful.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji said while expressing concern over the training of GPT-4 on huge amounts of internet data.

Balaji’s primary concerns were how generative AI systems could produce outputs that compete with the original copyrighted works used in their training.

“No known factors seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data," Balaji said in his blog post where he talked in detail about the unethical way of training generative AI.

He noted that this issue is not just limited to OpenAI, saying, “Fair use and generative AI is a much broader issue than any one product or company.”

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, currently in a legal battle with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, responded to Balaji’s death with a cryptic 'hmm' post on X (formerly Twitter).

OpenAI currently faces lawsuits from major media outlets including The New York Times which claim that the company’s practices infringe on copyright laws.

Balaji was named in a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, a day before he was found dead at his apartment in San Francisco.

OpenAI, as a gesture of good faith, said it would review Balaji’s custodial file related to the copyright concerns he had express

Although many former OpenAI employees raised concerns about the safety culture of the startup, Balaji was one of the few who actually took issue with the data that OpenAI trained its models on.

Balaji was named in court documents as someone with “unique and relevant documents” to support the lawsuits.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has consistently denied allegations os ingringing copyright laws.

“We see immense potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience,” the company said in a statement as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

The unexpected death of the young researcher has raised concerns about the ethical and legal implications of generative AI.

Despite being a key figure in the development of ChatGPT, Balaji, in his final days highlighted the AI industry’s reliance on copyright laws to defend its use of online data.

In the last two years, various AI companies have been sued, including OpenAI, over illegal usage of copyrighted material to train their technologies.

According to Balaji’s LinkedIn profile, he studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, before working at OpenAI. During college, he interned at OpenAI and Scale AI.

While at OpenAI, Balaji worked on WebGPT and later went on to work on the pretraining team for GPT-4, reasoning team with o1, and post-training for ChatGPT, his profile states.