Former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji, who later turned out to be OpenAi whistleblower for questioning the artificial intelligence company’s operations and practices, was found dead at his San Francisco apartment. Suchir Balaji came into the limelight when he openly criticised OpenAI for copyright violations, just after he resigned from the company in August 2024. He worked with OpenAI for almost 4 years and 1.5 years especially on ChatGPT before resigning.
According to the media reports, Suchir’s friends called San Francisco police to his apartment after concerns about his well-being. The officers arrived at his apartment and found his dead body and subsequently his death was confirmed on 26 November.
“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 authority spokesperson said in a statement given to TechCrunch. The cops have confirmed no evidence of foul play found at the incident place, and they have ruled the death a presumed suicide case.
The news of Suchir Balaji’s death got strong views on social media and even tech company giant Elon Musk responded to the news on social media X. Noticeably, Tesla and SpaceX Ceo Elon Musk is himself in a legal battle with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Suchir Balaji in his last interview to the NY Times, said he fears OpenAi’s practices are causing harm to the internet ecosystem. It is using individuals and business data with their consent.
Hmm https://t.co/HsElym3uLV— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2024
Who was Suchir Balalji?
Indian-American Suchir Balaji graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was brilliant at programming contests. He was ranked 1st in the 2017 Pacific Northwest Regional and Berkeley Programming Contests and got 31st rank in the ACM ICPC 2018 World Finals. He was the US Open 2016 National Champion and a USACO Finalist and also ranked 7th place in Kaggle's TSA-sponsored "Passenger Screening Algorithm Challenge," receiving $100,000 as prize money.
After graduating from the University of California, he joined Quora as a software engineer, then he worked as an intern for Scale AI, Helia. After that, he started working for OpenAI as a Technical staff member from November 2020 till August 2024. While working for almost 4 years with OpenAI, he also worked on post-training of ChatGPT for 1.5 years.
Past events
Earlier also, many former OpenAI employees have raised their concerns on the safety and practices of the startup. However, Mr. Balaji came openly to discuss the concerns with the data in a blog post. He started questioning the method of OpenAi using data to train its models.
Noticeably, a day before Suchir was found dead a court filing reportedly mentioned him in a copyright lawsuit against the artificial intelligence startup OpenAI. However, OpenAI, as honesty of intention, said it would search Mr. Balaji’s custodial file where he mentioned the copyright concerns.
I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I'm skeptical "fair use" would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post (https://t.co/xhiVyCk2Vk) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I…— Suchir Balaji (@suchirbalaji) October 23, 2024
Suchir in his last social media X post shared that he went into deep to know about copyright and fair use after seeing that many lawsuits are being filed against GenAI companies. He was concerned that AI companies are getting into data sharing and breaching the data of individuals to function in their programs like ChatGPT.
With inputs from agencies
Image Source: Multiple agencies
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