North News
Chandigarh, December 14
An Indian-origin former OpenAI researcher, Suchir Balaji, has been found dead in his San Francisco apartment, with authorities ruling his death a suicide. The incident comes months after Balaji voiced concerns about his former employer’s use of copyrighted data in its artificial intelligence programs, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Balaji’s death occurred two days before Thanksgiving. His recent statements about OpenAI’s practices and the ethical implications of generative AI tools had drawn attention. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Balaji clarified his motivations for speaking to The New York Times about OpenAI. “The NYT didn’t reach out to me for this article; I reached out to them because I thought I had an interesting perspective, as someone who’s been working on these systems since before the current generative AI bubble,” he wrote. “None of this is related to their lawsuit with OpenAI—I just think they’re a good newspaper.”
Balaji worked as an artificial intelligence researcher at OpenAI for nearly four years, contributing to projects that gathered and organized vast amounts of internet data to train AI systems. At the time, he believed the company was legally entitled to use the data, whether copyrighted or not. However, after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, he reconsidered the ethical implications of these practices, according to The New York Times.
Balaji concluded that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and caused harm to the internet. In August, he left the company, saying he no longer wanted to support technologies that he believed caused societal harm. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told the New York Times in a series of interviews. Balaji had not taken a new job but was working on “personal projects.”
He was among the first employees of a major AI company to publicly criticize the industry’s reliance on copyrighted data. Similar concerns have been raised by others, including a former vice president at Stability AI, a London-based start-up specializing in image- and audio-generating technologies, according to New York Times.
Balaji’s death has prompted reflections on the pressures faced by those working in the rapidly evolving and ethically complex field of artificial intelligence. His willingness to speak out against practices he viewed as harmful underscored the growing debate about the role of AI in society
