🚨🚨 Breaking: OpenAI whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, a 26-year old researcher, was found DEAD in his San Francisco apartment. Here's what we know about the circumstances surrounding his death, and the allegations he made against Sam Altman's blockbuster AI company.
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2/ An "Apparent Suicide"
According to the SFPD: Officers and medics went to Balaji’s at 1:15 p.m. on November 26 for a wellness check. When they arrived on scene, they located a deceased adult male and "no evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.”
3/ A Key Witness
Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT.
Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company.
4/ A Change of Heart
Suchir Balaji spent nearly four years as an artificial intelligence researcher at OpenAI.
But in August 2024, he left OpenAI because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.
5/ OpenAI - Bad for Business
In October, Balaji told the NYT: "ChatGPT and other chatbots are destroying the commercial viability of the individuals, businesses and internet services that created the digital data used to train these A.I. systems."
6/ "Not Fundamentally Novel"
On October 23, 2023, Balaji posted an essay on his personal site in which he proves through a mathematical analysis that ChatGPT has broken copyright laws: "The outputs aren’t exact copies of the inputs, but they are also not fundamentally novel."
7/ Generative Model Analysis
Balaji argued the technology violates the law because in many cases it directly competes with the copyrighted works it learned from, with the model designed to imitate “basically anything” on the internet.
8/ OpenAI's Sam Altman Disagrees
“We build our A.I. models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by longstanding and widely accepted legal precedents."
9/ OpenAI Transition to For-Profit Business
In September, it was announced that OpenAI was set to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity as part of a larger transition to becoming a for-profit company — with tens of billions of dollars at stake.
10/ OpenAI’s Multibillion-Dollar Gambit
Balaji's death comes at a critical period for the now multi-billion dollar blockbuster company which now boasts hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
There's certainly a lot more details yet to surface — more updates to come.
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