https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/12/13/openai-whistleblower-found-dead-in-san-francisco-apartment/
OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
By Jakob Rodgers | jrodgers@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
UPDATED: December 13, 2024 at 5:59 PM PST
SAN FRANCISCO — A former OpenAI researcher known for whistleblowing the blockbuster artificial intelligence company facing a swell of lawsuits over its business model has died, authorities confirmed this week.
Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment on Nov. 26, San Francisco police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. Police had been called to the Lower Haight residence at about 1 p.m. that day, after receiving a call asking officers to check on his well-being, a police spokesperson said.
Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAi employee, in San Francisco, on Oct. 3, 2024. Balaji helped gather and organize the enormous amounts of internet data used to train the startup's ChatGPT chatbot. (Ulysses Ortega/The New York Times)
Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAi employee, in San Francisco, on Oct. 3, 2024. Balaji helped gather and organize the enormous amounts of internet data used to train the startup’s ChatGPT chatbot. (Ulysses Ortega/The New York Times)
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.”
Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company.
Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program that has become a moneymaking sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world.
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.
The Mercury News and seven sister news outlets are among several newspapers, including the New York Times, to sue OpenAI in the past year.
In an interview with the New York Times published Oct. 23, Balaji argued OpenAI was harming businesses and entrepreneurs whose data were used to train ChatGPT.
“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 grew up in Cupertino before attending UC Berkeley to study computer science. It was then he became a believer in the potential benefits that artificial intelligence could offer society, including its ability to cure diseases and stop aging, the Times reported. “I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them,” he told the newspaper.
But his outlook began to sour in 2022, two years after joining OpenAI as a researcher. He grew particularly concerned 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, the news outlet reported.
The practice, he told the Times, ran afoul of the country’s “fair use” laws governing how people can use previously published work. In late October, he posted an analysis on his personal website arguing that point.
No known factors “seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data,” Balaji wrote. “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.”
Reached by this news agency, Balaji’s mother requested privacy while grieving the death of her son…
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