Suchir Balaji, OpenAI Whistleblower, Found Dead At US Apartment: Report

Suchir Balaji, a former Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher at OpenAI has been found dead in his San Francisco apartment. 26-year-old Balaji 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, emailed Forbes.

According to The Mercury News, the first to report about the death, Balaji was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26.

Balaji worked for OpenAI from November 2020 to August 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Two months ago, in an interview with The New York Times, Balaji alleged OpenAI for violating copyright law.

In a social media post on X (formerly Twitter), dated October 24, Balaji wrote about fair use and generative AI. Talking about his experience of working at OpenAI for four years, including his work on ChatGPT for a year and a half, Balaji concluded that “fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products.”

“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 (sic),” he wrote.

I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I'm skeptical "fair use" would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post (https://t.co/xhiVyCk2Vk) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I… — Suchir Balaji (@suchirbalaji) October 23, 2024

In a blog post, Balaji explains the four factors that determine whether generative AI qualifies for fair use or not. Among the four factors is the “effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”.

The fair use test also looks at the purpose and character of the use and nature of the copyrighted work – whether it is creative work that is highly protected by copyright or factual work.

In his long blog post, Balaji concludes, “None of the four factors seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data. That being said, none of the arguments here are fundamentally specific to ChatGPT either, and similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products in a wide variety of domains.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has a long-standing feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, reacted to Balaji's death with “Hmm”.

Hmm https://t.co/HsElym3uLV — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2024