Who was Suchir Balaji? Indian American OpenAI whistleblower was named in copyright lawsuit day before his suicide
A former OpenAI researcher, Suchir Balaji, reportedly died by suicide in his San Francisco apartment.
A former OpenAI researcher, Suchir Balaji, reportedly died by suicide in his San Francisco apartment, the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. The 26-year-old Indian American man raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law in an interview with The New York Times in October.
“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 said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comment or reports for publication at this time.”
Meanwhile, many took to social media to react to the incident, including Elon Musk. Take a look at the X owner's post:
Who was Suchir Balaji?
Balaji studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, before working at OpenAI. He interned at OpenAI and Scale AI while in college.
During his early days at OpenAI, Balaji worked on WebGPT, and later went on to work on the pretraining team for GPT-4, reasoning team with o1, and post-training for ChatGPT, his LinkedIn states.
Balaji quit OpenAI after working at the company for four years. He told The New York Times that he realised the technology would bring more harm than good to society, his main concern being how OpenAI allegedly used copyright data.
A spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department confirmed that the young researcher was found dead in his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26. He was found dead after officers and medics were called to his residence in the city’s Lower Haight district to perform a wellness check on him. Cops have said no evidence of foil play has been found.
Balaji expressed his concerns in an X post in October, saying, “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.”
A day before the OpenAI whistleblower was found dead, a court filing reportedly named him in a copyright lawsuit brought against the startup. OpenAI, as part of a good faith compromise, said it would search Balaji’s custodial file related to the copyright concerns he had expressed.
Many former OpenAI employees have raised concerns about the safety culture of the startup. However, Balaji was one of the few who actually took issue with the data that OpenAI trained its models on. He even raised questions in an October blog post.
An OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement after Balaji’s death, “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.”
Discussing suicides can be triggering for some. However, suicides are preventable. If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
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