news OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

[Jotham]

https://bsky.app/profile/techcrunch.com/post/3ld7znhtoye2l

Quote

A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, the 26-year-old AI researcher raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law when he was interviewed by The New York Times.

 

"The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the decedent as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The manner of death has been determined to be suicide," said a spokesperson in a statement to TechCrunch. "The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comment or reports for publication at this time."

 

After nearly four years working at OpenAI, Balaji quit the company when he realized the technology would bring more harm than good to society, he told The New York Times. Balaji's main concern was the way OpenAI allegedly used copyright data, and he believed its practices were damaging to the internet.

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[suburbannature]

The whistleblower to suicide ratio is a tad suspicious, I'd say.

[Bussea]

I read it as Oprah

 

[Bloo]

This is super eerie. There’s a growing amount of concern in the non-profit AI research space to investigate memorization, bias, and toxicity of these models. 
 

We really need to reign in these companies, especially OpenAI. 

[Johnny Jacobs]

I dont need proof. It was written on the walls. AI will accelerate our demise. 

[sugarysunflower]

Whistleblowing in America gets you the same "consequence" as Whistleblowing in Russia it seems……

[Revolution]

Elon, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel probably had him killed

[Princess Aurora]

Creepy

[Initials]

Very courageous of this young man to speak his truth.

I believe what he said is absolutely right. None of it is ethical and all of it is anti human.

Here's a little preview of what's to come if people don't reject this mess.

 

"To better plan logistics & boost productivity, for example, some Chinese employers have started using "emotional surveillance technology" to monitor workers' brainwaves which, "combined with artificial intelligence algorithms, [can] spot incidents of workplace rage, anxiety, or sadness."

The example showcases how personal the technology can become as it is normalized in daily life."

 

Edited 7 hours ago by Initials

[Letters From Adi]

Yeah, this is totally not suspicious at all...

[MattieB]

This is why Luigi and what he stands for is important

[DAP]

 

[Worm]

As much as I'm the first person to jump on these whistleblower death conspiracy theories, in this case it doesn't seem very likely to me. It's been well known for a lot longer than his interview with the NYT in October that there's a significant issue with generative AI and copyright works, and we've known for at least a year that these models were trained from scraping internet sites and vast, copyright-protected digital libraries of books.

 

So neither his more general points, about the broader question of AI and copyright law, nor his specific individual knowledge, about the data actually harvested to train OpenAI's models, were news to the public or secrets worth killing him over.

 

To be frank, it's not even a settled legal question whether these AI models actually infringe current copyright law at all (since it was obviously drafted without anything like AI in mind by the legislators), and policy is still being written to address these concerns and attempt to regulate the new technology. Which means his accusations could be nothing more than 'OpenAI might have broken the law, pending a definitive legal decision on the copyright infringing status of generative AI' - not something especially worth spilling blood over.

 

Realistically if it is a staged suicide, it would have to be out of some personal grudge about him turning on the company or maybe some undisclosed further knowledge he had about OpenAI that he was threatening to leak in the future. But as the story stands, there's nothing especially compromising about the details we've been given.