OpenAl confirmed the death of Suchir Balaji, 26, saying the company was devastated to hear the sad news. Picture: X / Suchir Balaji
A former researcher at the artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAl, who has since become a whistleblower against the company, has been found dead in his San Francisco apartment.
According to the BBC, Suchir Balaji, 26, took his life in late November. There was no sign of foul play.
The young researcher’s body was found in his apartment after police received a call asking officers to check on his wellbeing.
Balaji has spoken out publicly in recent months against data collection practices at OpenAl.
In October, he posted on X that he participated in a New York Times article about generative AI to explain why he was sceptical that “fair use” would be a plausible defence for many generative AI products.
Balaji said that the newspaper did not reach out to him but he made contact because he thought he had an interesting perspective as someone working on these systems before the current generative AI bubble.
The BBC reported that in the interview, Balaji alleged that OpenAI had violated US copyright law while developing its popular ChatGPT online chatbot.
The article said that after working at the company for four years as a researcher, Balaji had concluded that “OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data to build ChatGPT violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet”.
However, OpenAI says its models are “trained on publicly available data”.
Balaji left the company in August, telling the newspaper he had since been working on personal projects.
Meanwhile, CNBC reported that the San Francisco chief medical examiner’s office confirmed that Balaji had taken his own life.
An OpenAl spokesperson confirmed Balaji’s death, saying the company was devastated to hear the sad news and expressed its condolences to his family.
OpenAI is currently involved in legal disputes with several publishers, authors, and artists over its alleged use of copyrighted material for AI training data. A lawsuit filed by news outlets last December seeks to hold OpenAI and its principal backer, Microsoft, accountable for billions of dollars in damages.
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