Former OpenAI Engineer, Whistleblower Passes Away At 26

Suchir Balaji, an engineer who worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before leaving the company and publicly criticising its practices with regard to copyright law, has died at age 26.

Balaji worked at OpenAI from 2020 until August of this year, and later told journalists he departed the company due to his disillusionment over its practice of using large amounts of publicly available material to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told The New York Times in an article published in October.

The Times in December sued OpenAI and its biggest investor Microsoft claiming they used millions of articles from the paper to build AI models that now compete with the paper as sources of reliable information.

‘Not sustainable’

Both companies deny the claims, with OpenAI claiming its practices are consistent with fair use.

AI companies including OpenAI have been sued by computer programmers, artists, record labels, book authors and other news organisations.

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said in a social media post that Balaji did not believe better-than-human AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), “was right around the corner, like the rest of the company seemed to believe”.

But Balaji was concerned about more immediate threats, arguing that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other chatbots were destroying the viability of the individuals, businesses and internet services that created the information used to train the AI systems.

“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,” he told the Times.

Balaji had told media outlets he would “try to testify” in legal cases such as that brought by the Times.

‘Simple solutions’

Police said Balaji was found in his apartment in San Francisco, where OpenAI is based, on 26 November in an apparent suicide.

“No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation,” police said. The city’s chief medical examiner’s office confirmed the manner of death to be suicide.

Balaji’s parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy told the AP they were still seeking answers, describing Balaji as a “happy” young man who had recently returned from a hiking trip with friends.

Schulman, who also left OpenAI in August, said Balaji was an exceptional engineer who “had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked”.