The parents of Suchir Balaji — a former OpenAI employee turned whistleblower — have said they don’t believe their son committed suicide.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26. Police and the office of the chief medical examiner declared his death a suicide but Balaji’s parents have disputed that verdict.
“There was no suicide note left,” Balaji’s mother Poornima Ramarao tells ABC7. “There was nobody else at the scene but that doesn’t mean they can just come to a conclusion.”
Ramarao goes on to say she has “seen the blood shots in the bathroom” and “signs of a fight in the bathroom”.
Balaji was a former OpenAI researcher who blew the whistle on the company’s data scraping practices after he felt strongly that the Sam Altman-led company was violating copyright law.
Part of his job was to gather enormous amounts of data for OpenAI’s GPT-4 multimodal AI. At the time, he treated it as a research project and didn’t think that the product he was working on would ultimately turn out to be a chatbot with an integrated AI image generator.
But when the research project turned into an actual product, Balaji believed that OpenAI was threatening the very entities that it had taken the data from to build its AI tools — including individuals, businesses, and internet services.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji told The New York Times in October.
Balaji was expected to play a key part in upcoming...
United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not targeting illegal immigrants inside a medical facility or religious facility, despite concerns that the Trump administration would do so aft...