Who was OpenAI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji?

Suchir Balaji made headlines after he was tragically found dead at his apartment in San Francisco.

His body was found on November 26, 2024, and the medical examiner’s office 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.”

A former OpenAI employee, he had examined 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.

Prior to his death, Suchir Balaji openly criticised his former employers in interviews, adding to the mystery surrounding his death.

Who was He?

Suchir Balaji grew up in California and his fascination with artificial intelligence went back to 2013 when London-based startup DeepMind introduced AI that had learned to play Atari games on its own.

This prompted him to study neural networks, a machine-learning technique that mimics the human brain in analysing digital data and was the basis of DeepMind’s AI technology.

He was an accomplished computer scientist who studied at the University of California, Berkeley.

During his time there, he interned with OpenAI and Scale AI, gaining hands-on experience in cutting-edge technology.

After he graduated, Suchir joined OpenAI.

At the company, he worked on several projects, including WebGPT and ChatGPT-4’s pre-training.

His role later expanded to the reasoning team and post-training for ChatGPT.

Suchir Balaji was an integral part of OpenAI’s development team.

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.

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.

He claimed OpenAI had flouted fair use provisions under US copyright law.

During the process, generative models could imitate online data and serve as a substitute for “basically anything” on the internet.

By becoming the new preferred point of access for users, generative AI models were also prone to generating nonsensical and false information, called “hallucinations”.

OpenAI had dismissed any copyright breaches, saying:

“We build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by longstanding and widely accepted legal precedents.

“We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness.”

Suspicions Surrounding his Death

Although Suchir Balaji’s death has been ruled a suicide and there was no foul play, some have raised suspicions.

His death came shortly after his interview with the New York Times.

Suchir had also been named in a court filing.

The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that they had used millions of published articles to inform the intelligence and began competing with the outlet as a result.

It named Suchir as a person with “unique and relevant documents” that would be used in their litigation against Open AI.

Their suit said: “Microsoft and OpenAI simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers – all without any regard for the efforts, much less the legal rights, of those who create and publish the news on which local communities rely.”

Suchir had also said the risk of such technology was far more “immediate” than feared.

He added: “I thought that AI was a thing that could be used to solve unsolvable problems, like curing diseases and stopping ageing.

“I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them.”

After news of his death circulated, X owner Elon Musk posted a cryptic tweet.

It simply read: “Hmmm.”

The tweet suggested that Suchir’s death was not merely a suicide and other social media users shared their scepticism.

Responding to Musk’s tweet, one asked:

“What does ‘Hmmm’ mean? Do you think Suchir Balaji’s death was a suicide or once again the handiwork of the Deep State as he exposed the dirty secrets of OpenAI?”

Another commented: “Suchir Balaji did not kill himself.”

Suchir Balaji’s death has led to much speculation over whether it was actually suicide, especially given the timing of it.

His death happened shortly after his comments about OpenAI and his name being mentioned in a lawsuit.

The incident has also sparked a debate over OpenAI’s practices and whether they breach copyright laws.