(Trigger warning: This story contains references to suicide. Those considering taking their own life should call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline-988)
Police confirmed officers found 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher and whistleblower Suchir Balaji dead in his San Francisco apartment
Investigators discovered Balaji’s body when they responded to a request for a well-being check on November 26. However, news of his death didn’t become public until the San Francisco police and Chief Medical Examine confirmed in recent days to the Mercury News and other media.
In an email sent to CNBC on Friday, David Serrano Sewell, executive director of San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, said that “The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,”, and that no foul play was involved. Sewell also said that Balaji’s closest relatives have been contacted.
Balaji studied computer science at UC Berkeley and became fascinated by the potential of artificial intelligence. He accepted a job at OpenAI in 2020 and became concerned that it could be violating “fair use” laws by combing the internet to train its artificial intelligence program, GPT-4.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,”, Balaji told the New York Times. “This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,”
On the same day, Balaji took to Twitter to further express his opinions on fair use.
“I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies.”, said Balaji. “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.”
Balaji also included a link to his blog in the same tweet, where he explained his views on “fair use” and generative AI in further detail.
When OpenAI’s practices were revealed in 2022, OpenAI and other AI companies were sued by numerous journalists, computer programmers, and authors, arguing that their copyrighted work was illegally plagiarized by the companies to build chatbots, all while undermining their businesses.
“”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”, said the lawsuit filed by The Mercury News.”
NYT also sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, back in December. The Mercury News, seven sister outlets, and several newspapers, have also filed lawsuits against OpenAI within the past year.
As mentioned the San Francisco Examiner, Balaji was expected to be a witness in those lawsuits.
“The NYT didn’t reach out to me for this article; I reached out to them because I thought I had an interesting perspective, as someone who’s been working on these systems since before the current generative AI bubble.”, Balaji said on Twitter. “None of this is related to their lawsuit with OpenAI – I just think they’re a good newspaper.”.
On Nov. 25, the day before Balaji’s body was found, a court filing named Balaji in a lawsuit against OpenAI. TechCrunch reported OpenAI then reached a compromise to search his custodial file to investigate his copyright concerns.
In light of the recent news, many of Balaji’s coworkers and peers in the AI field have payed tribute to him on social media.
“Suchir Balaji was a good young man.”, said psychologist Gary Marcus on Twitter. “I spoke to him six weeks ago. He had left OpenAI and wanted to make the world a better place. This is tragic”
TechCrunch received an email from an OpenAI spokesperson mourning Balaji’s death, saying “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,”
As mentioned by the BBC, OpenAI says that it’s chatbots are “trained on publicly available data”. The company previously told the BBC that its software is “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation”, back in November.
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