OpenAI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji Dies, Police Ruled Suicide.
Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former researcher at OpenAI was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26 reported Huffington Post.
The police say it was a suicide. Balaji had accused OpenAI of using copyrighted material without permission. He had worked at OpenAI from 2020 to 2024.
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Balaji had studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He had interned at OpenAI and Scale AI.
His main concern was the unauthorised use of copyrighted data in training OpenAI’s AI models as his death has cast a shadow over the AI industry and his allegations have sparked a critical conversation about the ethics of AI development.
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Balaji had spoken out about his concerns that OpenAI was breaking copyright law. He had said that the company was using copyrighted content to train its AI models, like ChatGPT and spoke in a New York Times article on the topic.
In his final post on social media, Balaji shared the article and expressed his scepticism about the use of fair use as a defence for generative AI products.
I recently participated in an NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I’m sceptical “fair use” would be a plausible defence for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post (https://t.co/xhiVyCk2Vk) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I…
— Suchir Balaji (@suchirbalaji) October 23, 2024
Following his demise, OpenAI expressed devastation stating that their hearts go out to his loved ones during this difficult time. Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI also shared this news on the X platform.
uhhhhhh. guys pic.twitter.com/pg4XTGsySP
— Daniel (@growing_daniel) December 13, 2024
