OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment, suspected suicide

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI employee, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment at the age of 26. According to the San Francisco Coroner's Office, Balaji's cause of death was determined to be suicide. His body was found on November 26, and the police rushed to the scene after receiving a request for a health check. The initial investigation showed that nothing suspicious was found. Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years and participated in the development of ChatGPT. In an interview with the New York Times, he expressed his concerns about OpenAI's copyright law. He believes that OpenAI's technology may cause more harm to society, and its way of handling copyrighted data may have a negative impact on the Internet. He said on Twitter: "I didn't know much about copyright and fair use issues at first, but after seeing multiple lawsuits against generative AI companies, I began to pay attention to this issue and eventually concluded that many generative AI products seem to be quite unrealistic in the defense of fair use." (Decrypt)