Apparent suicide
OpenAI engineer turned whistleblower Suchir Balaji has died at the age of 26. His death, confirmed as a suicide by San Francisco officials.
Balaji’s parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, described their son as a “happy, smart, and brave young man” who loved hiking and had recently returned from a trip with friends. OpenAI, where he worked for nearly four years, released a statement saying, “We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time.”
Balaji joined the company in 2018 as a summer intern while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Upon returning as a full-time employee, he worked on groundbreaking projects, including WebGPT, a precursor to the widely known ChatGPT.
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said: “Suchir’s contributions to this project were essential, and it wouldn’t have succeeded without him. He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked.”
Later, Balaji worked on organising the massive datasets used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large language model. However, this work led him to question the ethics of using copyrighted material without proper permissions, a stance he publicly shared in interviews and a personal blog post.
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