Former OPenAI Researcher and Whistleblower Suchir Balaji Dead at 26

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI researcher and whistleblower has died. The 26-year-old Indian American was found dead in his San Francisco apartment last month. Police had been called to his residence in the Lower Haight neighborhood at about 1 pm on Nov. 26, “after receiving a call asking officers to check on his well-being,” The Mercury News reported, citing San Francisco police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The cause of death hasn’t yet been released, but police officials told The Mercury News that there is “currently, no evidence of foul play.”

Balaji’s death comes amidst ongoing lawsuits against OpenAI for alleged copyright violations regarding the training of its ChatGPT AI. The Mercury News and seven sister news outlets are among several newspapers, including The New York Times, to sue the San Francisco-based startup in the past year. The young techie, who worked with OpenAI for nearly four years, helped gather and organize the enormous amounts of internet data used to train the startup’s ChatGPT chatbot.

In an interview with the New York Times published on Oct. 23, Balaji argued OpenAI was harming businesses and entrepreneurs whose data were used to train ChatGPT.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told the outlet, adding that “this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”

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Balaji grew up in Cupertino before attending UC Berkeley to study computer science. He told The Times that at the university, he became “a believer in the potential benefits that artificial intelligence could offer society, including its ability to cure diseases and stop aging.” He thought “we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them,” he told the newspaper. At the time, he did not carefully consider whether the company had a legal right to build its products in this way. He assumed the San Francisco start-up was free to use any internet data, whether it was copyrighted or not.

But after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, he thought “harder about what the company was doing.” He came to the conclusion that “OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet.” He left the company in August because “he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit,” he told The Times. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company. He also told the publication that he hadn’t taken up a new job after leaving OpenAI, and was “working on personal projects.”