On Wednesday, Rep. Ro Khanna called for a “full and transparent” FBI investigation in the Nov. death of OpenAI whistleblower, 26-year-old Suchir Balaji, which has been ruled a suicide by the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office. Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer, had developed misgivings about OpenAI’s use of copyright data and was slated to testify in a Dec. 2023 lawsuit against the company.
Khanna’s post on X was addressed to Balaji’s mother, Poornima Ramarao, who has been publicly raising doubts about the verdict of suicide for weeks. In a Wednesday interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Ramarao revealed that a private autopsy commissioned by her husband and herself could not confirm the verdict of suicide.
Neither the official autopsy nor the private one commissioned by Balaji’s parents have been released to the public.
Khanna told The Mercury News that he had begun to believe there are unanswered questions surrounding Balaji’s death after a long conversation with Ramarao earlier on Wednesday.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26 after the police received calls to conduct a wellness check. He had been dead since Nov. 22nd.
However, Ramarao said in her interview with Tucker Carlson that her son had been upbeat on the 22nd, having just returned home from a Catalina Island backpacking trip with friends. When they did not hear from their son for a few days, they demanded that the police break into his apartment. Within a few hours of finding the body, the medical examiner informed them of the verdict of suicide.
“Right from that moment, I see foul play,” she said in the interview.
Balaji’s parents have since called for a fuller investigation of the circumstances of his death. Ramarao said in the Carlson interview that they continue to maintain their son’s Hayes Valley apartment as it was when the body was discovered, in the hope that an authoritative investigation can be performed at a future date.
Balaji played a key role in the development on OpenAI’s flagship ChatGPT generative AI product, particularly in the collation of vast amounts of internet data used for training the model.
However, Balaji said in an Oct. 2024 interview with the New York Times, he developed misgivings about OpenAI’s widespread use of copyrighted material after the release of ChatGPT in 2022. He left the company in August 2024.
A month before his death, he wrote a detailed analysis of the copyright issue in an article on his own website titled “When does generative AI qualify for fair use?”
In the essay, Balaji pointed out that since the release of ChatGPT, question-answer website Stack Overflow had already seen a decline in traffic, showing that ChatGPT could affect the income of content creators.
But Balaji’s alarm about his former employer went beyond privately-held notions. He was slated to give testimony in the The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York in Dec. 2023.
In the lawsuit, Balaji is denoted as a “custodian” of internal documents to be produced during trial.
Ramarao said during the Carlson interview that she and her husband intend to publish a virtual reality model of the circumstances of their son’s death in order to make a public case for further investigation. They have set up a cryptocurrency Solana wallet for Balaji’s well-wishers to contribute to their legal fees as they continue to seek answers.
AsAmNews is published by the non-profit, Asian American Media Inc.
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