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Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old Indian American and former researcher at OpenAI, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment

Balaji gained attention earlier this year after publicly accusing OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright laws in the development of ChatGPT.

In 2020, he joined OpenAI, following an internship at Scale AI and Helia.

Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old Indian American and former researcher at OpenAI, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26. The San Francisco Police Department responded to a call for a wellness check at his Buchanan Street residence in the Lower Haight neighborhood around 1 PM. Authorities later confirmed his death was a suicide, with no evidence of foul play.

Balaji gained attention earlier this year after publicly accusing OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright laws in the development of ChatGPT. He argued that the company’s methods of training AI models, which involved analysing vast amounts of online data, were unfair and harmful to creators and businesses whose content was used without proper authorisation.

In his last social media post, Balaji wrote, “I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes...

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