Suchir Balaji, a former artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at OpenAI, has been found dead in his San Francisco apartment. The 26-year-old is said to have committed suicide.
“During the initial investigation, no evidence of foul play was found,” Officer Robert Rueca, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department, told Forbes.
According to The Mercury News, Balaji was found dead in his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he worked for OpenAI from November 2020 to August 2024.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who has a long-standing feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, responded to the news with a cryptic “hmm” post on X (formerly Twitter).
Hmm https://t.co/HsElym3uLV
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2024
OpenAI was co-founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Three years later, Musk left OpenAI and founded another rival startup, xAI.
Last month, Musk claimed that OpenAI is a monopolist.
Suchir Balaji said that OpenAI has violated the copyright law
In October, Suchir Balaji had claimed that OpenAI was violating copyright law.
“If you believe what I believe, you should just leave the company,” he said in an interview with DailyExpertNews.
He also said technologies like ChatGPT are damaging the Internet.
In a social media post on X in October, Balaji had also written about fair use and generative AI.
Talking about his experience working at OpenAI for four years, including his work on ChatGPT for a year and a half, Balaji concluded that “fair use seems a fairly unlikely defense for many generative AI products.”
“I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc., but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. As I tried to understand the problem better, I ultimately concluded that fair use seems a fairly unlikely defense for many generative AI products, for the fundamental reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they've trained. on (sic),” he wrote.
I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I'm skeptical that “fair use” would be a plausible defense for many generative AI products. I've also written a blog post (https://t.co/xhiVyCk2Vk) about the key details of fair use and why I…
— Suchir Balaji (@suchirbalaji) October 23, 2024
In a blog post, Balaji explained the four factors that determine whether generative AI qualifies for fair use or not. One of the four factors is the “effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”
The fair use test also looks at the purpose and nature of the use and the nature of the copyrighted work – whether it is a creative work that is highly copyrighted or a factual work.
Balaji concluded: “None of the four factors appear to make ChatGPT a fair use of its training data. That said, none of the arguments here are fundamentally specific to ChatGPT, and similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products in a wide variety of domains.