A former employee of artificial intelligence company OpenAI who alleged the company’s programs violated copyright was found dead of an apparent suicide in his San Francisco apartment last month, officials shared Friday.
San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner identified the deceased as 26-year-old Suchir Balaji, who spoke out against his company’s practices in an October article in The New York Times. He was found dead two days before Thanksgiving.
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“The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” the medical examiner’s office said. “The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comment or reports for publication at this time.”
The Mercury News was the first to report the death.
Following the news, an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch: “We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time.”
OpenAI’s most well-known product is ChatGPT, a chatbot launched in 2022 that feeds people information it gathers from data across the internet. When Balaji spoke to the Times about his decision to leave the company in August, he cautioned that “this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”
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Balaji also spoke out about the company on social media.
“I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them,” he wrote. “I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious...
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