Who Was Suchir Balaji, 26-Year-Old OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead In US

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI researcher, was found dead at his San Francisco apartment on November 26, a day after Thanksgiving. Authorities have ruled the death an apparent suicide, with the initial probe showing no evidence of foul play.

In October, the 26-year-old researcher quit OpenAI, accusing the AI giant of violating copyright laws by scraping the internet and using copyrighted material to train its models. He warned that such practices could damage the entire internet ecosystem.

Who was Suchir Balaji?

Suchir Balaji graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Bachelor's in Computer Science in 2021.

Mr Balaji excelled in programming contests, placing 31st in the ACM ICPC 2018 World Finals and winning first place in the 2017 Pacific Northwest Regional and Berkeley Programming Contests. He also secured 7th place in Kaggle's TSA-sponsored "Passenger Screening Algorithm Challenge," earning a $100,000 prize. He was also the US Open 2016 National Champion and a USACO Finalist, as per his LinkedIn profile.

He worked at Scale AI, Helia, and was a Software Engineer at Quora, before joining OpenAI.

The 26-year-old worked at OpenAI for four years, including a year and a half on ChatGPT, before becoming an outspoken critic of the company's practices. In an October article in The New York Times, he accused OpenAI of violating copyright laws, saying, "If you believe what I believe, you have just to leave the company."

Mr Balaji also raised concerns about generative AI products, including ChatGPT, arguing they were damaging the internet and questioned their reliance on "fair use" as a defence. In a blog post, he enumerated the four factors of fair use, concluding that ChatGPT likely failed to meet these criteria.

Among these factors was the "effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work," which he argued generative AI products adversely impacted by creating substitutes for original content.