By Cyrus Farivar, Richard Nieva and Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes Staff
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.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told The New York Times.
“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’.”
OpenAI has disputed his assertions and broader claims that it violated copyright law.
Balaji worked at OpenAI for four years, contributing to the collection and organization of training data for OpenAI’s star product ChatGPT. According to the New York Times, he was working on a “personal project” after leaving OpenAI.
Balaji’s death came one day after a court filing specifically named him as someone whose professional files OpenAI would search as part of a lawsuit brought by numerous authors that sued the startup. OpenAI agreed “to identify documents in his custodial file (if any) related to purported copyright concerns he has recently raised following his employment at OpenAI.”
In a statement, OpenAI expressed condolences over Balaji’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,” Jason Deutrom, a spokesperson, emailed Forbes.
