NEW YORK: A 26-year-old Indian-origin former employee of the artificial intelligence giant OpenAI has died by suicide in San Francisco, authorities said.
Suchir Balaji was found dead in his Buchanan Street apartment in San Francisco on Nov 26, police and Office of the chief medical examiner were quoted as saying by The Mercury News.
The medical examiner's office determined the manner of death to be suicide and police officials said there is "currently, no evidence of foul play".
Balaji was known for being a whistleblower against the AI giant that is facing a swell of lawsuits over its business model. He worked there for nearly four years.
Balaji's death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating US copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative AI programme that has become a money-making sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world, the report said. agencies
OpenAI was harming entrepreneurs, biz, Suchir had told NYT Its public release in late 2022 spurred a torrent of lawsuits against OpenAI from authors, computer programmers and journalists, who say the company illegally stole their copyrighted material to train its programme and elevate its value past $150 billion.
In an interview with the New York Times published on Oct 23, Suchir Balaji argued that OpenAI was harming businesses and entrepreneurs whose data were used to train ChatGPT. Balaji left OpenAI because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.
"If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company," he told the outlet, adding that "this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole."
In a post on X in October, Balaji said: "I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defence for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on."
Balaji grew up in Cupertino and studied computer science at UC Berkeley. His mother has requested privacy while grieving the death of her son.agencies