Suchir Balaji, a whistleblower who formerly worked at AI juggernaut OpenAI, was found dead in his apartment in San Francisco late last month due to su

OpenAI Whistleblower’s Death Ruled Suicide, Police Say

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2024-12-14 03:30:02

Suchir Balaji, a whistleblower who formerly worked at AI juggernaut OpenAI, was found dead in his apartment in San Francisco late last month due to suicide, both local police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said.

“No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation,” Officer Robert Rueca, a spokesperson with the San Francisco Police Department, emailed Forbes.

Balaji’s November 26 death was first reported Friday by the San Jose Mercury News. In October, the 26-year-old researcher left OpenAI and alleged the AI behemoth had broken copyright law by scraping the internet and infringing upon copyrighted work to train its AI models. He further asserted that the use of this data would harm the entire internet ecosystem.

“While generative models rarely produce outputs that are substantially similar to any of their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of copyrighted data,” Balaji wrote on his personal website at the time. “If these copies are unauthorized, this could potentially be considered copyright infringement, depending on whether or not the specific use of the model qualifies as ‘fair use’.”