Suchir Balaji, 26, an AI researcher and ex-OpenAI employee, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment, per the medical examiner. His death, ruled a suicide, occurred on November 26. The San Francisco Police found no evidence of foul play. Balaji worked at Open AI for nearly four years, spending the last 18 months on Chat GPT.
He left the company after raising concerns about AI’s societal impact. In October, Balaji spoke to The New York Times. He is concerned about copyright violations in Open AI’s use of data to train its AI models. He believes such practices harm the internet. He questions the validity of fair-use defenses for AI tools. They create content that competes with their training data.
“We are devastated by this sad news. We send our condolences to Suchir’s family,” an Open AI representative told TechCrunch. The police did a wellness check at Balaji’s apartment in the Lower Haight. They received a call about it. Medics confirmed his death at the scene. Before his passing, Balaji had criticized generative AI’s copyright approach on social media.
The story was first reported by the San Jose Mercury News.
Several newspapers, including the New York Times, are suing Open AI and Microsoft. They allege copyright violations related to generative AI. A November 25 court filing named ex-Open AI employee Suchir Balaji in a copyright lawsuit against the company. Open AI agreed to review Balaji’s files as part of the legal process after he raised concerns about the data used to train its models.
Balaji, a 26-year-old AI researcher, was concerned about generative AI. He worried about the ethical use of its training data. In an October blog post, he doubted if Chat GPT’s use of such data was fair use. He pointed out that other AI techniques had same problems. At Open AI, he helped on projects like Web GPT, an early web-search AI. He also worked on GPT-4’s pretraining, reasoning systems, and Chat GPT’s post-training.
Balaji attended UC Berkeley to study computer science prior to joining Open AI. He worked as an intern at Scale AI and Open AI. After leaving Open AI, he sought to improve the AI field. His peers admired this goal and mourned his recent passing. Social media tributes called Balaji kind and devoted to fixing AI’s ethics. His work and advocacy have left a lasting impression on the AI community.
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