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A former OpenAI employee , Suchir Balaji , was recently find dead in his San Francisco apartment , according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner . In October , the 26 - twelvemonth - old AI research worker raised concern about OpenAI breaking right of first publication police when he was interview byThe New York Times .
“ The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ( OCME ) has identified the decedent as Suchir Balaji , 26 , of San Francisco . The way of death has been determined to be felo-de-se , ” said a spokesperson in a statement to TechCrunch . “ The OCME has notified the next - of - kin and has no further scuttlebutt or reports for publication at this time . ”
After nearly four year working at OpenAI , Balaji quit the caller when he realized the engineering would bring more harm than secure to beau monde , he told The New York Times . Balaji ’s main concern was the way OpenAI allegedly used copyright data , and he believed its practices were damaging to the net .
“ We are devastated to larn of this fabulously sad word today and our ticker go out to Suchir ’s loved unity during this hard fourth dimension , ” said an OpenAI spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch .
Balaji was found dead in his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26 , a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department tell TechCrunch . policeman and medical officer were called to his residence in the urban center ’s Lower Haight territorial dominion to do a health handicap on the former OpenAI researcher . No evidence of foul gambling was found during the initial probe , allot to police force .
“ I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them , ” said Balaji in atweetfrom October . “ I ab initio did n’t know much about copyright , fair usance , etc . but became curious after escort all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies . When I attempt to understand the issue good , I finally come to the conclusion that fair purpose seems like a jolly farfetched defense for a lot of generative AI Cartesian product , for the canonic reason that they can create substitute that compete with the data they ’re educate on . ”
Balaji ’s death was first report by theSan Jose Mercury News .
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OpenAI and Microsoft are currently involved with several ongoing suit from newspaper publisher and media newspaper publisher , including the New York Times , who take the productive AI startup has broken right of first publication law .
On November 25 , one Clarence Day before police found Balaji ’s organic structure , a court filingnamed the former OpenAI employee in a right of first publication lawsuit lend against the startup . As part of a good faith via media , OpenAI accord to explore Balaji ’s custodial data file related to the right of first publication concerns he had latterly raised .
Several former OpenAI employee have raised concerns about the startup ’s guard culture , but Balaji was one of the few who took issue with the data that OpenAI trained its models on . In ablog postfrom October , the former OpenAI researcher wrote that he did n’t believe ChatGPT was a average use of its training datum ; however , similar arguments could be made for many productive AI product , he said .
Before working at OpenAI , the 26 - year - erstwhile investigator study information processing system science at the University of California , Berkeley . During college , he interned at OpenAI and Scale AI , the former of which he would go on to work for .
Balaji worked on WebGPT during his former days at OpenAI , a fine - tuned version of GPT-3 that could search the web . It was an early version of SearchGPT , which OpenAI release sooner this yr . Later on , Balaji function on the pretraining team for GPT-4 , logical thinking squad with o1 , and post - preparation for ChatGPT , according to hisLinkedIn .
Several of Balaji ’s former peers and workfellow in the AI world took to societal media to mourn his red .
This is implausibly sad news . Suchir was genial and thoughtful , and his talk out on AI and copyright was enormously apprise by a lot of people . He will be greatly missed.https://t.co/gYTbHB1Jme
Suchir Balaji was a near young man . I spoke to him six weeks ago . He had left OpenAI and wanted to make the world a better place . This is tragic.https://t.co/1Jqwd26QPd
Very deplorable to hear about Suchir :( https://t.co/2kdvD2uRfg
