Suchir Balaji, once upon a time OpenAI An engineer and whistleblower who helped build the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed they violated copyright laws has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26.
Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before leaving in August. He was well-regarded by his colleagues in San Francisco, where the co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI’s strongest contributors, who was essential to developing some products.
“We are devastated to learn this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to their loved ones at this difficult time,” said OpenAI.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26 in what police said was “an apparent death. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation. The state’s chief medical examiner confirmed the manner of death as suicide.”
His parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they are still looking for answers, describing their son as a “happy, smart and strong young man” who loved to hike and had recently returned from a trip with friends.
Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first landed an AI research internship in the summer of 2018 while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. A few years later he returned to work for OpenAI, where one of the first projects, called WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT.
“Contributions like this were essential to this project, and without it it wouldn’t have succeeded,” OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said on social media after Balaji’s memorial. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what made him such an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and ability to spot bugs or logical errors.
“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing neat code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He would think carefully and rigidly through every matter.”
Balaji later moved on to organize the massive data of online literature and other tools used to establish GPT-4, the fourth generation model of OpenAI’s flagship language and the basis of the company’s famous chatbots. It was this work that ultimately led Balaji to build the technology in question, especially after newspapers, storytellers and others began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.
He first raised his concerns with Theophrastus New Yorkwhich Balaji reported in October.
He later told the Associated Press that he would “testify” in the strongest prejudice cases and that the lawsuit brought by the New York Times last year was “very serious.” The Times lawyers named him to file in court on November 18 as someone who might have “unique and relevant” documents to the allegations that OpenAI’s own copyrights will be prejudiced.
His records were also sought by prosecutors in a separate case from the authors of a book owned by comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing.
“It doesn’t feel right to engage in people’s data and compete with them in the marketplace,” Balaji told the AP in late October. “I don’t think you can do it. I don’t think you can do it right.”
He said the AP has gradually grown more involved with OpenAI, especially after internal turmoil that led to the firing of its board of directors and then the hiring of its CEO, Sam Altman, last year. Balaji said he was largely concerned about how his commercial products had been developed, including a tendency to spread false information known as hallucinations.
But he said he was worried about “bags of problems” and put it on paper that he “can do something about it”.
He acknowledged that there is an unpopular opinion within the AI research community that usually pulls data from the internet, but he said “they will have to change that over time.”
There was no deposition, and it is unclear how his revelations would be admissible in any legal proceedings after his death. He also published a personal blog post with his thoughts on the topic.
Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji coincidentally left on the same day and celebrated with his colleagues over dinner and drinks at a San Francisco bar. Another of Balaji’s leading advisors, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, had left OpenAI several months earlier, which saw Balaji’s exit another attack.
Schulman told him that Balaji had abandoned his OpenAI project earlier this year and that Balaji didn’t think better-than-human AI, that general artificial intelligence was “right around the corner, as the rest of the company seemed to believe.” The junior engineer expressed interest in getting a doctorate and exploring “some ideas about the beaten path of how to build intelligence,” Schulman said.
Balaji’s family said a memorial is planned for later this month at the Indian Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino.
In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, chat on 988lifeline.orgor text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans They can be contacted on the freephone 116 123, or by email jo@samaritans.org or * jo@samaritans.ie. Australia’s crisis support service Lifeline it 13 11 14. Other international aids can be found befrienders.org
The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement allowing OpenAI access to a portion of the AP text archive.