(Trigger warning: This story contains references to suicide. Those considering taking their own life should call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline-988)
Police confirmed officers found 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher and whistleblower Suchir Balaji dead in his San Francisco apartment
Investigators discovered Balaji’s body when they responded to a request for a well-being check on November 26. However, news of his death didn’t become public until the San Francisco police and Chief Medical Examine confirmed in recent days to the Mercury News and other media.
In an email sent to CNBC on Friday, David Serrano Sewell, executive director of San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, said that “The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,”, and that no foul play was involved. Sewell also said that Balaji’s closest relatives have been contacted.
Balaji studied computer science at UC Berkeley and became fascinated by the potential of artificial intelligence. He accepted a job at OpenAI in 2020 and became concerned that it could be violating “fair use” laws by combing the internet to train its artificial intelligence program, GPT-4.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,”, Balaji told the New York Times. “This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,”
On the same day, Balaji took to Twitter to further express his opinions on fair use.
“I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became...
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