Authorities have reported the death of a former OpenAI researcher who had become a whistleblower, discovered in an apartment in San Francisco.
Authorities found the body of 26-year-old Suchir Balaji on November 26, following a call that prompted police to conduct a welfare check.
The San Francisco medical examiner’s office has ruled the death a suicide, with police reporting no indications of foul play.
In recent months, Mr. Balaji has taken a public stance against the practices of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, which is currently embroiled in several lawsuits concerning its data-gathering methods.
In October, the New York Times featured an interview with Mr. Balaji, who claimed that OpenAI breached US copyright law while developing its widely used ChatGPT online chatbot.
According to the article, after four years of employment as a researcher, Mr. Balaji concluded that “OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data to build ChatGPT violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet.”
OpenAI asserts that its models are developed using publicly accessible data.
Mr. Balaji departed from the company in August, stating in an interview with the New York Times that he has been focussing on personal projects since then.
Raised in Cupertino, California, he later pursued a degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
A representative from OpenAI expressed deep sorrow in a CNBC News statement stating that the organization was “devastated to learn of this unfortunate news today, and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time.”
News publishers from the US and Canada, among them the New York Times and a collective of prominent authors such as John Grisham, have initiated legal action asserting that the company unlawfully utilized news articles to develop its software.
In a statement to the BBC in November, OpenAI asserted that its software is “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation.”
