Indian-American Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former researcher at OpenAI known for his whistleblowing against the company, was found dead in his home in San Francisco on November 26, reported Chicago Tribune.
Police responded to a call requesting a welfare check at approximately 1 p.m. on the same day. Authorities have said that Balaji's death was a suicide, and there is “currently no evidence of foul play.”
The tragedy comes three months after Balaji publicly accused OpenAI of breaching U.S. copyright law in the development of ChatGPT, the highly popular generative artificial intelligence program.
The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 triggered a wave of lawsuits against OpenAI. Authors, computer programmers, and journalists accused the company of illegally using their copyrighted material to train its AI model, which significantly boosted its market value to over USD 150 billion.
Balaji, who departed from OpenAI in August after a four-year tenure, was a significant figure voicing ethical concerns regarding the use of copyrighted materials to train generative AI models like ChatGPT.
“I recently participated in a New York Times story about fair use and generative AI, and why I’m sceptical ‘fair use’ would be a plausible defence for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I believe this,” Balaji had written on X.
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