Suspicious OpenAI Whistleblower Death Ruled Suicide

The November death of former OpenAI researcher-turned-whistleblower, 26-year-old Suchir Balaji was ruled a suicide, the San Jose Mercury News reports.

According to the medical examiner, there was no foul play in Balaji’s Nov. 26 death in his San Francisco apartment.

Balaji had publicly accused OpenAI of violating US copyright law with ChatGPT. According to the NY Times;

He came to the conclusion that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet.

In August, he left OpenAI because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he said during a recent series of interviews with The New York Times.

The Times named Balaji a person with “unique and relevant documents” that the outlet would use in their ongoing litigation with OpenAI – which claims that the company, and its partner Microsoft, are using the world of reporters and editors without permission.

In an October post to X, Balaji wrote: “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 filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense 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. I’ve written up the more detailed reasons for why I believe this in my post. Obviously, I’m not a lawyer, but I still feel like it’s important for even non-lawyers to understand the law — both the letter of it, and also why it’s actually there in the first place.”

He then made a lengthy post on his personal blog outlining why he thinks OpenAI violates Fair Use. Four weeks later he was dead.

Balaji, who grew up in Cupertino, California, studied computer science at UC Berkeley – telling the Times that he wanted to use AI to help society.

“I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them,” he told the outlet.

But in 2022, after two years with OpenAI, Balaji grew concerned over the data he was assigned to gather for the company’s GPT-4 program, which was trained on virtually the entire internet. He told the Times that this violated US “fair use” laws.

“Microsoft and OpenAI simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers — all without any regard for the efforts, much less the legal rights, of those who create and publish the news on which local communities rely,” the Times said in its lawsuit.

OpenAI has refuted the claims, saying all of its work is covered under fair use.

“We see immense potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience,” the company said.