A whistleblower from OpenAI, who raised concerns about the artificial intelligence company’s practices, has found dead in his flat, officials have confirmed.
Authorities discovered Suchir Balaji, aged 26, deceased in his Buchanan Street flat on November 26, according to San Francisco police and the Medical Examiner’s Office. Officers responded to a welfare check at the Lower Haight residence around 1 pm that day, a police representative confirmed, reported Chicago Tribune.
Whilst the medical examiner has not disclosed the cause of death, police indicated there are “currently, no evidence of foul play.”
His knowledge was anticipated to be crucial in legal proceedings against the San Francisco company.
Three months before his death, Balaji publicly claimed OpenAI had breached US copyright legislation in developing ChatGPT, an AI system that has achieved widespread commercial success with hundreds of millions of users globally.
The late 2022 launch triggered numerous legal challenges from writers, programmers and journalists, who alleged the company unlawfully used their copyrighted content to develop its programme and increase its valuation beyond $150 billion.
In a New York Times interview published October 23, Balaji contended that OpenAI was negatively impacting businesses and entrepreneurs whose information was utilised to train ChatGPT.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told the outlet, adding that “this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”
In his last post, Balaji cleared confusion about New York Times went to him for the interview.
He said, “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.”