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OpenAI key whistleblower found dead after apparent suicide

Suchir Balaji was a 26-year-old man who claimed that the company was using copyrighted material to train ChatGPT.

An OpenAI file imageMarco Bertorello / AFP.

Published by
Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón

It was revealed Friday that San Francisco police found OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, 26, dead in his Lower Haight apartment on Nov. 26.

The news was revealed by SiliconValley.com and police said there is "no evidence of foul play" and that the death was ruled a suicide.

"The manner of death has been determined to be suicide," said David Serrano Sewell, director of the city's chief medical examiner's office.

The death of Balaji, a former researcher at OpenAI, came just a month after he pointed the finger at the company for using copyrighted material to train ChatGPT.

Balaji's allegation was made by him in October, shortly after he left the company in August. The New York Times was one of the media outlets that echoed the investigator's complaint, who will possibly be subpoenaed by several plaintiffs against OpenAI.

According to local media outlet, The San Francisco Standard, officers arrived at Balaji's home at 1:15 p.m. on Nov. 26 for a wellness check.

“Officers and medics arrived on scene and located a deceased adult male from what appeared to be a suicide,” SFPD said. “No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.”

In his latest post on X, Balaji discussed the New York Times article and his complaint against OpenAI.

"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," Balaji wrote a month before he passed away. "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."

Balaji also asked that his complaint not be interpreted "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."

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