Former OpenAI AI researcher, Suchir Balaji, has been found dead in his home in San Francisco, California. They said the unidentified 26-year-old man killed himself.
“Found no signs of foul play during the preliminary probe,” said Officer Robert Rueca, SFPD source for Forbes.
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OpenAI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji Death
The Mercury News says that Suchir Balaji was on November 26 discovered dead in his Buchanan Street apartment.
His LinkedIn profile indicates that he worked for OpenAI from November 2020 up to August 2024.
The founder of SpaceX and Tesla, who allegedly have beef with OpenAI head Sam Altman, made no secret of his contempt and responded to the news with a simple “hmm” on X(formerly twitter).
It was formed in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Nearly three years after that, Musk left OpenAI, and created another competing start-up, xAI.
Earlier this month, Musk went further and accused Open AI of being a monopolist.
After working at OpenAI for nearly four years, Balaji left the company when he believed the technology would harm society, according to The New York Times. His main concern was OpenAI’s use of copyright data, which he thought was damaging to the internet.
“I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them,” said Balaji in a tweet from October.
In October Suchir Balaji had said that OpenAI was pirating its own model and thus violating copyright law.
They told Bloomberg News that Rogozinsky, who left the company earlier this year, allegedly told the BBC in an interview “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company.”He also claimed that what was bad for the internet today, including ChatGPT were being harmed by it.I, has been found dead in his San Francisco apartment. The 26-year-old reportedly died by suicide.
“No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation,” Officer Robert Rueca, a spokesperson with the San Francisco Police Department,told Forbes.
According to The Mercury News,Suchir Balaji was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26.
He worked for OpenAI from November 2020 to August 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who has a long-standing feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, reacted to the news with a cryptic”hmm”post on X(formerly Twitter).
Elon Musk React on : Suchir Balaji Death on Social Media
OpenAI was co-founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015. Three years later, Musk left OpenAI and founded another rival start-up,xAI.
Last month, Musk alleged that OpenAI is a monopolist.
Suchir Balaji Said OpenAI Broke Copyright Law
In October, Suchir Balaji had alleged that OpenAI was violating copyright law.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he said in an interview with The New York Times.
He also said that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet.
In a social media post on X in October, Balaji had also written about fair use and generative AI.
Wrapping up his discussion of the fact of evaluating OpenAI for four years, working on ChatGPT for a year and a half, Balaji stated that he thought “it is kind of hard to imagine a whole bunch of generative AI products fitting within what we understand the fair use doctrine to be.”
I previously had little understanding of copyright, fair use and such things but after witnessing so many legal cases against GenAI companies, I got interested. In an effort to get a far better grasp of the conflict I happened to be engulfed in, I reached the conclusion that fair use seems like a fairly wild card defense especially for numerous generative AI goods due to the fact that they can make duplicates that rival the data set they are trained on (sic),” he wrote.
Introducing the concept of fair use, Balaji has identified four parameters that make or mar any generative AI. The four factors include, the “effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”.
The copyright test of fair use also includes the purpose and character of the use and nature of the copyrighted work – whether it is creative work that is highly subject to protection under the copyright law or factual work.
In Balaji’s view, none of the four factors appear to tilt in favor of ChatGPT as fair use of its training data. With this in mind, none of the arguments here are uniquely applicable only to ChatGPT and the same arguments could be made for many generative AI products in multiple domains.
While OpenAI and its partner Microsoft have defended they operate under the so-called ‘fair use’ doctrine – a legal doctrine that permits use of copyrighted work for certain limited purposes – as being valid in their context, Balaji did not concur.
He said that while the AI text does not directly reproduce data, it is too similar to the original works and undermines creators.
When joining OpenAI Balaji helped work on WebGPT, a GPT-3 version with web browsing capability and was later used in the creation of SearchGPT. According to his profile on LinkedIn, he also worked as a pretrainer for GPT-4, the reasoner for o1, and the posttrainer for ChatGPT.
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