A former employee of artificial intelligence company OpenAI who claimed the company’s software infringed on copyrights was found dead in his San Francisco apartment last month, officials said Friday.
The San Francisco Chief Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed the deceased as 26-year-old Suchir Balaji. Balaji had been critical of OpenAI’s work in an interview with The New York Times in October. His body was found two days before Thanksgiving.
“The medical examiner’s office has determined the death to be a suicide,” the office said. “The OCME has notified the family of the deceased and does not intend to release any further statement or report at this time.”
Balaji’s death was first reported by The Mercury News.
An OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch after the incident: “We are deeply saddened by this very sad news, and we extend our deepest condolences to Suchir’s family at this difficult time.”
OpenAI’s most famous product is the ChatGPT chatbot, which was launched in 2022. The program uses data available on the internet to respond to people. Balaji spoke to The New York Times in August about his reason for leaving the company, saying: “This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”
Balaji has also been vocal about his concerns about the company on social media.
“I worked at OpenAI for about 4 years, and the last 1.5 years I worked on ChatGPT,” he wrote. “I didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. at first, but after seeing the lawsuits against generative AI companies, I became interested in these issues. As I tried to understand the issue more deeply, I came to the conclusion that fair use protections for many generative AI products are not convincing, because they can create substitutes that compete with the data they are trained on.”
The Times is among the parties accusing OpenAI of using copyrighted material to train its systems. According to The Mercury News, the information Balaji knew was expected to play a significant role in those lawsuits.
