Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old Indian-American OpenAI whistleblower, has been found dead in his San Francisco apartment. The San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office said the manner of death was ruled a suicide, and San Francisco police found no evidence of foul play in his apartment.
Balaji worked as a researcher at OpenAI before finally quitting the company earlier this year. After leaving the company he was vocal about how the ChatGPT maker violated copyright law by imitating online data and substituting for anything on the internet and replacing existing services.
Since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, OpenAI has been embroiled in a number of lawsuits claiming that the company used copyrighted work in training their chatbot.
In his last social media post, Balaji wrote, “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.” Balaji added
Who is Suchir Balaji?
Balaji studied computer science at the University of California, Berkley and did an internship at OpenAI at Scale AI. He would join a number of Berkley graduates working for OpenAI in 2020. According to the New York Times, Balaji began collecting data for a new project called GPT-4 in early 2022, spending months analysing all English-language text on the internet.
He initially thought of the work as a research project that GPT-3 was not a chatbot, but a way to use companies and computer programmers to build other software applications.
“With a research project, you can, generally speaking, train on any data… That was the mind-set at the time.” he told The Times
However, after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Balaji gave a serious thought to what OpenAI was doing and concluded that the company was essentially violating copyright law and such technologies were damaging to the internet.