"fair use seems like a pretty implausible defence"
OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji was found dead at his apartment in San Francisco.
His body was found on November 26, 2024, and the medical examiner’s office has now determined that Suchir took his own life.
Police added that “currently, no evidence of foul play”.
A spokesperson said: “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.
“The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comment or reports for publication at this time.”
Suchir worked at OpenAI for nearly four years, playing a big role in data collection for its AI tool ChatGPT.
But after its release in 2022, he began critically examining the legal and ethical dimensions of OpenAI’s practices.
By mid-2023, he concluded that these AI technologies were harmful to both the internet and society, leading to his decision to resign.
An OpenAI spokesperson said: “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.”
In an X post, Suchir Balaji said: “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 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 defence 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.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Suchir said OpenAI was impacting businesses and entrepreneurs, using their information to train ChatGPT.
He said: “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company.
“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”
Suchir had also expressed concerns about OpenAI on his personal website, claiming its way of copying data for model training was a potential copyright infringement.
Since the news of his death, Suchir’s final post on X has gone viral.
Also, since I see some incorrect speculation:
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…
— Suchir Balaji (@suchirbalaji) October 23, 2024
Suchir’s death was determined as suicide but some are sceptical, with billionaire Elon Musk tweeting:
“Hmmm.”
Suchir was found dead just over a week after The Times filed a letter in a federal court that named the 26-year-old as a person with “unique and relevant documents” that they would use in their current litigation against OpenAI.
The lawsuit alleges Microsoft and OpenAI are simply copying the work of their reporters and editors with flagrant disregard for journalistic ethics and legality.
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