Indian American individual Suchir Balaji, a former researcher at OpenAI, died by suicide in his apartment in San Franciso. The news was confirmed by the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). In an interview with The New York Times in October 2024, Balaji raised concerns about the artificial intelligence company breaching copyright law.
The 26-year-old researcher’s next of kin has been informed by OCME. His death has drawn the attention of not only the netizens but also famous personalities like Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO shared the news on his X account with the caption ‘Hmm.’
Suchir Balaji was an alumnus of the University of California, Berkeley. While studying at UCB, he did internships at OpenAI and Scale AI, as understood from his LinkedIn profile. As per The New York Times report published on October 23, 2024, Balaji spent four years as an AI researcher at the company and his job required him to gather internet data to build ChatGPT.
However, while working at OpenAI, he did not realize whether the company was permitted to establish ChatGPT in the way they were doing it. Soon he understood the use of copyrighted data was in strict violation of the law. During his conversation with NYT, he said,
“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”
Suchir Balaji was found dead in his apartment after officers and medics were called to the place to do the mandatory wellness checks. Investigators did not find any instance of foul play.
In October 2024, Suchir Balaji shared it was he who reached out to the media outlet and not otherwise
After the media house published the story, Suchir Balaji took to his X on October 24, 2024, where he clarified that he approached the news outlet first and not the other way around as he believed he had an interesting perspective. He wrote,
“The NYT didn't reach out to me for this article; I reached out to them because I thought I had an interesting perspective, as someone who's been working on these systems since before the current generative AI bubble. None of this is related to their lawsuit with OpenAI - I just think they're a good newspaper.”
Balaji left the company in August 2024 due to his ethical standpoint saying such kind of technology would bring more harm to society. However, OpenAI rejected the researcher’s viewpoint and mentioned that their models were built on data that is publicly available and permitted for fair use.
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Nevertheless, Suchir Balaji felt Artificial Intelligence could be used to solve problems like curing diseases and other aging-related concerns. It would be some kind of scientist that could bring in solutions.
In the NYT report, he argued that the technology violated the law by competing with the copyrighted works it was trained on. Suchir Balaji noted that generative models, designed to mimic online data, could replace various internet content, from news articles to forums. He also highlighted that AI replaced traditional online services, by producing false or fabricated information.
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