A former OpenAI researcher, Suchir Balaji, reportedly died by suicide in his San Francisco apartment, the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. The 26-year-old Indian American man raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law in an interview with The New York Times in October.
“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the decedent as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” a spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comment or reports for publication at this time.”
Balaji studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, before working at OpenAI. He interned at OpenAI and Scale AI while in college.
During his early days at OpenAI, Balaji worked on WebGPT, and later went on to work on the pretraining team for GPT-4, reasoning team with o1, and post-training for ChatGPT, his LinkedIn states.
Balaji quit OpenAI after working at the company for four years. He told The New York Times that he realised the technology would bring more harm than good to society, his main concern being how OpenAI allegedly used copyright data.
A spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department confirmed that the young researcher was found dead in his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26. He was found dead after officers and medics were called to his residence in the city’s Lower Haight...
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