Indian-origin OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji found dead in San Francisco apartment

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Former OpenAI employee and whistleblower, Indian-origin Suchir Balaji, was found dead at his apartment in San Francisco. Suchir was 26.

He had made headlines after he accused the ChatGPT developer of violating copyright law in the U.S.

The San Francisco police spokesperson’s email sent to indica stated, “On 11/26/24 at approximately 1:15 pm officers responded to a residence on the 100 block of Buchanan St. for a wellbeing check. Officers and medics arrived on the scene and located a deceased adult male from what appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.”

“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the decedent as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” said a spokesperson in a statement to TechCrunch. “The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comment or reports for publication at this time.”

Suchir was found dead in his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26. Cops reached his Lower Haight residence at about 1 p.m. that day, following a call which requested officers to check on Suchir’s his well-being, The Mercury News reported, citing a police spokesperson.

Suchir’s LinkedIn page shows he worked with Open AI from November 2020 to August 2024. Three months ago, he made the claims against his former employers,

As per reports, Suchir grew up in Cupertino and studied computer science at UC Berkeley.

During an interview with The New York Times, which was published on October 23, he argued that OpenAI was harming businesses and entrepreneurs whose data were used to train ChatGPT.

Speaking on the issue of fair use and generative AI, Suchir’s last post on X, published on October 24, read: “I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I’m skeptical “fair use” would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post (https://suchir.net/fair_use.html) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I believe this.”

“To give some context: I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them. I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. 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. “That being said, I don’t want this to read as a critique of ChatGPT or OpenAI per se, because fair use and generative AI is a much broader issue than any one product or company. I highly encourage ML researchers to learn more about copyright — it’s a really important topic, and precedent that’s often cited like Google Books isn’t actually as supportive as it might seem.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI said it was ‘devastated’ to learn about Suchir’s death. “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,” said an OpenAI spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch.

The death also drew a reaction from tech billionaire Elon Musk.

“Hmm,” he said, sharing the news of the techie’s death on X.

Musk and Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015. Musk later left the company and founded a rival startup xAI.

(Photo courtesy: x.com/suchirbalaji)

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