Mystery as Open AI whistleblower Suchir Balaji is found dead in San Francisco home

A former OpenAI researcher turned whistleblower was found dead in his San Francisco just months after making damning claims about the company.  

Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead on November 26, three months after he accused the company of violating copyright laws in their development of ChatGPT. 

Mercury News reported that there was no foul play determined in the circumstances of his death which has been ruled a suicide. 

San Francisco Police Officers were called to the home to conduct a wellness check when they found him.

Balaji had been a researcher for the artificial intelligence research company for four years after joining in 2020..

After the AI system was released in 2022, Balaji began to question if the data that was gathered was an infringement on copyright. 

In August, he left OpenAI because he ‘no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit,’ reported the New York Times. 

‘If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,’ he told the outlet. 

Over the past two years, companies like OpenAI have been sued by various individuals and businesses for claims on their copyrighted material.

His role and knowledge in legal proceedings against the company was considered ‘crucial.’

The New York Times was involved in their own lawsuit against OpenAI and its primary partner, Microsoft, who both denied claims that they had used millions of published articles to inform the intelligence and began competing with the outlet as a result.  

On November 18, the outlet filed a letter in federal court that named Balaji as a person with ‘unique and relevant documents’ that would be used in their litigation against Open AI.

Their suit said: ‘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.

Whilst other researchers have warned of potential future risks of the technology, such as becoming a danger to humanity, Balaji told the Times that he believes the risk to be far more ‘immediate’ than feared. 

He added: ‘I thought that AI was a thing that could be used to solve unsolvable problems, like curing diseases and stopping aging. I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them.’

Balaji said that he believed the threats posed by chatbots, such as ChatGPT, were destroying the commercial viability of the individuals, businesses and internet services that created the digital data used to train such systems. 

‘This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,’ he said. 

While OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies have claimed their use of internet data to train the technology falls under ‘fair use’, Balaji does not believe the criteria has been met. 

He claimed that while the data is not being copied to an exact replica, it is also not different enough. 

In an October post to his X account, he said that he ‘came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense’ for AI products.  

X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk reacted to the news of his death on his platform, writing a cryptic post that said: ‘Hmmm’.

Balaji further argued that it violates the law due to direct competition with the very information that it drew and learned from. 

The larger problem, he argued, is that the technology replaces already existing internet services and often generating false or completely made-up information.

OpenAI said in a statement about his 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.’