Suchir Balaji News: The news of the suicide of Suchir Balaji, a former researcher at Open AI, has created a stir in the tech world. The 26-year-old Indian-American researcher died in his apartment on Buchanan Street in San Francisco. The Chief Medical Examiner’s Office of San Francisco has confirmed in this case that his death was due to suicide. Police and medical team were called to his home for a health check, but no criminal evidence was found.
Suchir Balaji left the company after working for four years at Open AI. He believed that this technology could be more harmful for the society. In particular he raised questions about Open AI’s alleged use of copyrighted data. In an interview, he said, “As I learned more about copyright and fair use, I thought the fair use defense was a weak argument for generative AI products, because they could create replacements that were not compatible with the data. Compete on what they have been trained for.”
Three months before his death, Balaji publicly claimed that OpenAI had violated US copyright law in developing ChatGPT, an AI system that has achieved widespread commercial success with millions of users globally . When Open AI launched in late 2022, it faced a number of legal challenges from writers, programmers, and journalists who alleged that the company used their money to develop its program and increase its valuation to more than $150 billion. Illegal use of copyrighted material.
Balaji studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and interned at Scale AI and Open AI before working at Open AI. In his early days at Open AI, he worked on Web GPT and later contributed to GPT-4’s pre-training team, O1’s reasoning team, and Chat GPT’s post-training team.