Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher, was discovered dead in his San Francisco flat a few weeks ago.
TakeAway Points:
- Former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji was discovered dead in his San Francisco flat in recent weeks, authorities told CNBC.
- Later this year, Balaji departed OpenAI and publicly expressed his worries that the business had reportedly broken copyright rules in the United States when developing its well-known ChatGPT chatbot.
- David Serrano Sewell, executive director of San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, emailed CNBC to inform them that the cause of death was ruled to be suicide.
- OpenAI’s outage on Wednesday left users unable to access ChatGPT or the Sora video generator.
- Earlier in the day, OpenAI said Apple was releasing an integration of ChatGPT into the iPhone’s iOS operating system.
A former OpenAI researcher died at age 26
A 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher, Suchir Balaji, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment in recent weeks, CNBC has confirmed.
Balaji left OpenAI earlier this year and raised concerns publicly that the company had allegedly violated U.S. copyright law while developing its popular ChatGPT chatbot.
“The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” David Serrano Sewell, executive director of San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, wrote in an email on Friday. He said Balaji’s next of kin have been notified.
The San Francisco Police Department said in an e-mail that on the afternoon of Nov. 26, officers were called to an apartment on Buchanan Street to conduct a “wellbeing check.” They found a deceased adult male and discovered “no evidence of foul play” in their initial investigation, the department said.
News of Balaji’s death was first reported by the San Jose Mercury News. A family member contacted by the paper requested privacy.
In October, The New York Times published a story about Balaji’s concerns.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji told the paper. He reportedly believed that ChatGPT and other chatbots like it would destroy the commercial viability of people and organizations who created the digital data and content now widely used to train AI systems.
A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed Balaji’s death.
“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” the spokesperson said in an email.
Disputes copyrighted materials for AI training
OpenAI is currently involved in legal disputes with a number of publishers, authors, and artists over the alleged use of copyrighted material for AI training data. A lawsuit filed by news outlets last December seeks to hold OpenAI and principal backer Microsoft accountable for billions of dollars in damages.
“We actually don’t need to train on their data,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at an event organized by Bloomberg in Davos earlier this year. “I think this is something that people don’t understand. Any one particular training source doesn’t move the needle for us that much.”
ChatGPT Service Is Back After Hours-long Outage
OpenAI said in an early Thursday X post that its popular ChatGPT assistant, Sora video generator, and programming interface for software developers were working again after hours of downtime.
ChatGPT has hit the mainstream. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said on December 4 that the company’s technology was reaching 300 million active users each week. On Wednesday, Apple released new versions of its software for the iPhone, iPad and Mac that bring integrations with ChatGPT.
According to an OpenAI status page, ChatGPT was down for just over four hours. An outage in June lasted for over five hours.
OpenAI was valued at $157 billion in a funding round in October that included participation from existing backer Microsoft as well as chipmaker Nvidia. The company’s rapid ascent began with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 and has been the biggest story in the tech industry over the last couple years.
On Monday OpenAI said it was releasing Sora to people in the U.S. and most other countries, but on Tuesday, Altman wrote on X that “we significantly underestimated demand for sora; it is going to take awhile to get everyone access.“
Late on Thursday, OpenAI said the incident resulted from the introduction of monitoring software rather than a security incident or a launch.
