Suchir Balaji, Ex OpenAI an engineer and whistleblower who helped train artificial intelligence systems ChatGPT and later said he believed the practices violated copyright law, died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26 years old.

Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before resigning in August. He was well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where the co-founder this week named him one of OpenAI’s biggest contributors who was instrumental in the development of some of its products.

“We are saddened to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones at this difficult time,” OpenAI said in a statement.

Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, in what police said “appears to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.” The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner confirmed that the manner of death was suicide.

His parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they were still searching for answers, describing their son as a “happy, smart and brave young man” who loved hiking and had recently returned from a trip with friends.

Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the fledgling artificial intelligence research lab for a summer internship in 2018 while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned a few years later to work at OpenAI, where one of his first projects, called WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT.

“Suchir’s contribution to this project has been critical and would not have been possible without him,” OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said in a social media post dedicated to Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what made him such an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and ability to spot subtle mistakes or logical errors.

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“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He would think carefully and rigorously about the details.”

Balaji later shifted to organizing the massive datasets of online records and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large-language model and the foundation for the company’s famous chatbot. It was this work that eventually made Balaji question the technology he helped build, especially after the newspapers, the novelists and others began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.

He first took his concerns to The New York Times, which reported on it in October Balaji profile.

He later told the Associated Press that he would “try to testify” in the most serious cases of copyright infringement and he believes the lawsuit he initiated The New York Times was “most serious” last year. Attorneys for the Times named him in a Nov. 18 court filing as someone who may have “unique and relevant documents” supporting allegations of OpenAI’s willful copyright infringement.

His records were also sought by lawyers in a separate case brought by book authors including comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing.

“It doesn’t seem right to me to train on people’s data and then compete with them in the market,” Balaji told the AP in late October. “I don’t think you should be able to do that. I don’t think you can do that legally.”

He told the AP that he gradually became more disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after internal turmoil which led its board of directors to fire and then rehire CEO Sam Altman last year. Balaji said he is generally concerned about how his commercial products appear, including their tendency to spew false information known as hallucinations.

But of the “bag of issues” that concerned him, he said he focused on copyright as one that “it’s actually possible to do something about”.

He acknowledged that this is an unpopular opinion within the artificial intelligence research community, which is used to drawing data from the Internet, but said that “it will have to change and it’s only a matter of time.”

He has not been deposed and it is unclear to what extent his revelations will be accepted as evidence in any legal cases after his death. He also published a personal blog post with his opinion on the subject.

Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji happened to leave on the same day and celebrated with colleagues that night over dinner and drinks at a bar in San Francisco. Another of Balaji’s mentors, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, left OpenAI a few months earlierwhich Balaji saw as another incentive to leave.

Schulman said Balaji told him earlier this year about his plans to leave OpenAI and that Balaji didn’t think artificial intelligence better than humans, known as artificial general intelligence, was “right around the corner, like the rest of the company believed.” The junior engineer expressed interest in pursuing a doctorate and exploring “some off-the-beaten-path ideas about how to build intelligence,” Schulman said.

Balaji’s family said a memorial is planned later this month at the Indian Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino.

© 2024 The Canadian Press