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The mother of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, is calling for an FBI investigation into his death. Poornima Ramarao took to X on Sunday to announce that Balaji’s family had hired a private investigator, whose preliminary findings cast doubt on the city’s chief medical examiner’s ruling that Balaji died by suicide.
Just 26 years old, Balaji worked at OpenAI for four years, where he played a key role in collecting the data that would be used to train ChatGPT. However, he became disillusioned with OpenAI’s transformation from a non-profit research lab to a for-profit business, and he resigned before going public in August. interview with New York Times claims massive copyright infringement. The news outlet is currently engaged in a heated legal battle with OpenAI, which claims it trained ChatGPT on its unauthorized articles.
“Suchir’s apartment was robbed” post Ramarao (goes by the shorter surname ‘Rao’ in X) sings. “Signs of a struggle in the bathroom and it looks like someone shot him because of the blood stains in the bathroom.” The identity of the X account has not been verified, but it has shared pictures of Balaji that have not been posted elsewhere on the internet. It’s also linked to a GoFundMe account that aims to raise funds for further research, which has raised more than $47,000.
Elon Musk, co-founder of OpenAI and currently engaged in his own lawsuit against the AI giant, he answered Ramarao’s post was simply captioned, “It doesn’t look like suicide.”
Gizmodo we reached out to Ramarao for comment but have not heard back. Referred to OpenAI previous statement condolences to the family.
Update is active @suchirbalaji
We hired a private investigator and conducted a second autopsy to determine the cause of death. A private autopsy did not confirm the cause of death given by police.
Suchir’s apartment was robbed, there was a sign of a struggle in the bathroom, and it looked as if someone had shot him …
— Poornima Rao (@RaoPoornima) December 29, 2024
Balaji started working at OpenAI as an intern in 2018 and joined the company full-time in 2021. Business Insider gave an interview Writing after his son’s death, Ramarao wrote that Balaji was gifted from a young age and made significant contributions to ChatGPT’s training methods and infrastructure during his time there. In 2022, it was tasked with mining data from the internet for use in training GPT-4, the model that would power the launch of ChatGPT later that year.
Balaji has served as a high-profile whistleblower in the fight over whether AI companies have the right to openly use the Internet in their products, as OpenAI kicks off Silicon Valley’s generative AI race. It’s a very divisive topic, with media companies openly claiming plagiarism and tech industry insiders chalking it up to fair use. At stake are potentially tens of billions of dollars and the future of what some believe is the next major platform shift in technology. The large language models that power models like ChatGPT require large amounts of training data, primarily written texts, to write like a human and answer any question posed to them.
Unsurprisingly, Balaji faced a lot of criticism and online abuse after he went public with his concerns. Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley has seen how the pressure to succeed can lead to major stress and other mental health issues. This doesn’t even include other risk factors, such as legal issues related to a whistleblower complaint; losing your job and harming your future career prospects; or social isolation from peers in the industry.
Is it possible that Balaji was targeted for his actions? Maybe, but conspiracies are hard to keep secret, and the boring answer is often the right one. It’s not hard to see how anything that happened to Balaji could lead to despair. It wouldn’t be the first case of a tech whistleblower taking their own life because of their moral beliefs, Theranos chief scientist Ian Gibbons said in a statement. took his own life after facing huge pressure from founder and now-convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes for raising concerns about the reliability of the company’s blood tests.
It’s no wonder that Balaji’s parents will do anything they can, hoping for answers and disbelieving that they’ve lost their son. Perhaps something more sinister has happened. However, at this point, there is no serious reason to believe that this is the case. Hopefully, they can find the parcel they are looking for.
