OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead In San Francisco Apartment

A former OpenAI employee and whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, was found dead in his apartment last month, according to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Balaji, 26, was found dead when San Francisco police officers entered his apartment for a wellness check, the outlet reported. The San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has confirmed Balaji as the deceased person, adding that his family has been notified.

The medical examiner’s office has classified the manner of death as a suicide and ruled that there is no evidence to suggest foul play.

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@suchirbalaji via X

Prior to his death, Balaji publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law with its generative AI application, ChatGPT. The California native joined the company as a researcher in 2022 but quickly became disillusioned with his work due to the workings of image and text generation programs.

Earlier this year, Balaji was featured in a piece from the New York Times in which he revealed what he believes are fair use violations that are committed regularly by the popular chatbot. On November 18, the outlet filed a letter in federal court that named Balaji as an individual with “unique and relevant documents” that they would use in their current lawsuit against OpenAI, according to a report from The Mercury News.

“I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them,” Balaji wrote in an X post back in October. “I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed 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 defense 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,” his post continued.

OpenAI and Microsoft are currently facing a number of lawsuits accusing them of copyright violations through the use of generative AI programs.

“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,” a spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement to Fox News.

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