OpenAI Chat GPT Suchir Balaji
Former OpenAI researcher and whistleblower Suchi Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, 2024, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. As per the authorities, his death was caused by suicide and they ruled out any angle of foul play. The 26-year-old had previously made headlines when he accused OpenAI of violating US copyright laws in the development of ChatGPT. OpenAI is already dealing with lawsuits and Balaji’s insights were to play a major role in the lawsuits against the company.
Balaji was not only critical of OpenAI’s practices but he was also a big advocate for copyright laws and urged his fellow ML researchers to understand more about it. Even in his last tweet, he shared details about the foul practices that took place at OpenAI and shared how he was also not aware about it at first.
Also read: OpenAI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji found dead: What he had said against the AI company
“I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I’m skeptical “fair use” would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post (suchir.net/fair_use.html) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I believe this.
To give some context: I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them. I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense 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. I’ve written up the more detailed reasons for why I believe this in my post. Obviously, I’m not a lawyer, but I still feel like it’s important for even non-lawyers to understand the law — both the letter of it, and also why it’s actually there in the first place.
That being said, I don’t want this to read as a critique of ChatGPT or OpenAI per se, because fair use and generative AI is a much broader issue than any one product or company. I highly encourage ML researchers to learn more about copyright — it’s a really important topic, and precedent that’s often cited like Google Books isn’t actually as supportive as it might seem.
Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to chat about fair use, ML, or copyright — I think it’s a very interesting intersection. My email’s on my personal website.”
Several OpenAI employees also took to social media to mourn his death. Foul play has been ruled out in Balaji’s case but it has raised concerns about safety and the pressure that whistleblowers have to deal with.