OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji’s death: Netizens enrages over delayed announcement

The netizens both in America and India are furious that Suchir Balaji’s death was announced so late, despite the fact that he had passed away on November 26, 2024.

Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old whistleblower from OpenAI, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26.

According to the San Francisco Police Department, Balaji committed suicide and no evidence of foul play was found during the investigation. 

Who is Suchir Balaji?

Indian-American, Suchir Balaji majored in Computer Science from University of California, Berkley, one of the best universities for computer science.

Balaji first joined OpenAI as an intern during his college days and started working as full time-employee soon after finishing his graduation.

His first project with the company was WebGPT that focused on improving collection and sharing of information on AI platforms.

Suchir Balaji was one of the key developers for ChatGPT, who worked for OpenAI from November 2020 to August 2024 and used to gather and organize data that drove the AI tool.

He left the company in August 2024 as he was concerned about the ethical standard of the company’s AI practice that he himself was associated with.

Balaji stated that the company used copyrighted materials without the permission of original authors which according to him was an unfair practice.

Accusations against OpenAI

According to media reports, Balaji who formerly worked for OpenAI, had information that was very important in the case against OpenAI.

The company OpenAI along with its partner Microsoft has several ongoing lawsuits, one of them being of copyright infringement.

Moreover, Suchir Balaji stated that the technology would cause more harm than good especially with the use of copyrighted material.

Sharing a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), he shared his views on the use of copyright data by OpenAI.

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 (https://t.co/xhiVyCk2Vk) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I…

— Suchir Balaji (@suchirbalaji) October 23, 2024

While Balaji was not directly involved in the case himself, his insights and knowledge became a topic of debate on how AI platforms should operate.

Investigation of Suchir Balaji’s death

The police showed up at Suchir Balaji’s apartment after his friends expressed their worry about Balaji’s welfare.

The police found the body and ruled his death as suicide in their initial investigation with no evidence or lead found by the San Francisco police yet.

Elon Musk and OpenAI

OpenAI was co-founded by Elon Musk along with Sam Altman in December 2015, headquartered in San Francisco. 

Musk resigned from the Board of Directors seat in 2018 due to his conflict of interest as the CEO of Tesla, mainly because of Tesla’s AI development in self-driving cars.

Hmm https://t.co/HsElym3uLV

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2024

He reposted one of the tweets on X about the death of former whistleblower, Suchir Balaji with a caption “Hmm”.