2 weeks Ago
Suchir Balaji, an Indian-American former researcher at OpenAI who had openly criticised the company’s practices, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on 26 November. According to the San Jose Mercury News , Balaji was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment, as confirmed by San Francisco Police and the office of the chief medical examiner. The medical examiner's office determined the manner of death to be suicide, and police officials this week said there is "currently, no evidence of foul play".
"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," a spokesperson was quoted as saying in reports. "The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comment or reports for publication at this time," the spokesperson added.
Balaji worked for nearly four years at OpenAI before quitting the company, apparently after realising the technology would do more harm than good to society, he told The New York Times . In October this year, the 26-year-old raised serious ethical concerns about Sam Altman-led chatGPT maker OpenAI "breaking copyright law", and described OpenAI’s approach to data collection as harmful. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he said, expressing concern over the training of GPT-4 on massive amounts of internet data.
In a post on X in the last week of October, Balaji said: "I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them. I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc.
but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits against GenAI companies." Also Read: Meta fails to detect AI-created fake ads inciting religious violence "When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defence for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on," he wrote. Balaji’s concerns centred on how generative AI systems could produce outputs that compete with the original copyrighted works used in their training.
In a blog post he argued, “No known factors seem to weigh in favour of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data.” He noted that this issue extended beyond OpenAI, saying, “Fair use and generative AI is a much broader issue than any one product or company.” The lawsuits against OpenAI, including those from major media outlets such as the New York Times , claim that the company’s practices infringe on copyright laws.
Balaji was named in court documents as someone with “unique and relevant documents” to support the lawsuits. Earlier this month, the New York Times sued OpenAI and its primary partner Microsoft, claiming they used millions of articles published by NYT to build chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. Both companies have denied the claims.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is currently in a legal battle with OpenAI CEO Altman, responded to the news of Balaji's death with a cryptic "hmm" post on X. Also Read: Open AI, owner of ChatGPT, accused of EU data protection violations An OpenAI spokesperson said "We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time.” Balaji grew up in Cupertino, California before attending the University of California, Berkeley to study computer science.
With agency inputs.
