OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, Indian-American, found dead in San Francisco apartment. Who was he?

Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher who had voiced concerns about the company's policies and procedures, was discovered dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, the Chicago Tribune reported.

When police and paramedics got to the location, they discovered a dead adult male who had apparently committed suicide. According to the police, statement cited Who was by the San Francisco Chronicle, "no evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation."

Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating US copyright law while developing ChatGPT.

Many people expressed horror at Balaji's death, which triggered a huge internet reaction. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, responded to the news with a ‘hmm’

Who was Suchir Balaji?

Suchir Balaji, who spent more than four years at OpenAI, played a key role in the development of ChatGPT.

Before working at OpenAI, Suchir Balaji studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. While in college, he interned at Scale AI and OpenAI.

According to Suchir Balaji's LinkedIn profile, he worked on WebGPT in his early days at OpenAI. He later joined the pretraining team for GPT-4, the reasoning team with o1, and the post-training team for ChatGPT.

Suchir Balaji's last social media post

"At first, I knew very little about fair use or copyright law, but the spate of cases against generative AI firms piqued me. Based on my research, I concluded that many generative AI products are unlikely to be protected by fair use, particularly given these systems can produce alternatives that compete with the data they are trained on. Even though I'm not an attorney, I think it's important for people who aren't attorneys to comprehend the law in its specifics and overall purpose. Since the fair use issue extends well beyond any one business or product, this is not intended as a criticism of ChatGPT or OpenAI. I think copyright law is an important topic for machine learning researchers to learn about. Examples such as Google Books, which are frequently cited," states Suchir Balaji in his last social media post on the X platform dated October 24 

According to the Mercury News, Balaji's mother has asked for privacy as she mourns the loss of her son.