A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, the 26-year-old artificial intelligence researcher raised concerns about OpenAI's violation of copyright law when he gave an interview to the New York Times.
“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) identified the deceased as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The manner of death has been determined to be a suicide,” a spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.
After nearly four years at OpenAI, Balaji resigned from the company when he realized that the technology it would do more harm than good to society, as he reported in the New York Times. Balaji's main concern was the way OpenAI was using copyrighted data and he believed its practices were harmful to the Internet.
Balaji was found dead in his apartment on Buchanan Street on November 26, he told TechCrunch San Francisco Police Department spokesman. According to the police, there was no evidence of an attack.
"I've been at OpenAI for almost 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1,5 of those," Balaji said in a tweet in October. “At first I didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc., but I got curious when I saw all the lawsuits filed against the company. When I tried to understand the issue better, I came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty unlikely defense for many productive AI products, for the basic reason that they can create surrogates that compete with the data they've been trained on.”
On November 25, a day before the police found Balaji's body, a court filing quoted the former OpenAI employee in a treatment copyright brought against the startup. OpenAI agreed to investigate the archives that Balaji was working for over the copyright concerns he had raised.
Several former OpenAI employees have raised concerns about the startup's security culture, but Balaji was one of the few to question the data OpenAI trained its models with. In a post on his blog in October, the former OpenAI researcher wrote that he didn't think ChatGPT was making good use of the data educationhis. However, similar arguments could be made for many AI products, he said.
For various reasons, which many people know, I have a huge admiration, a huge respect and I bow down to any whistleblower. Public Interest Witness, Greek.
Perhaps because these people, the whistleblowers, are the modern, "hand-holding" and true "super heroes" of modern society who, after putting aside their "I", perhaps their own interests as well as those of their families , GIVE, OFFER elements which, IF the governments and their Authorities used them, the saying: "it's capitalism" would cease to exist idiot”…
Perhaps again because, following the teachings of my family but also due to character, I became one of them. Not asking for recognition, not looking for credit and praise, I gave what evidence I had (and I have a lot more) to COMPETENT AUTHORITIES to expose a monster that oppresses our Country and its Citizens. However, elements that entered the "file" as: an unknown perpetrator, since it "didn't help" the timeless government systems, to come to the surface...
With these and with those, I will make some references, for those who want to think whether it is WORTH there to be romantic people, stupid according to the other side, who believe that even a spark, many times can cause a big fire change of mind.
Case of Kostas Tsalikidis. Search for it on google. It's about vodafone.
Boeing case. Start reading from https://iguru.gr/pethane-kai-defteros-katangellon-tis-boeing/
Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Maria Efimova, Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Edward Manning cases.
I could add an additional three names of Greeks (for banks and PPC cases), but I will not, for various reasons that are not relevant here.
Those who read my words, let them ask themselves if they want to live a life on their knees ... persuading those verbs or if they want to break the abscesses that exist around us.
Ps the day when all the countries of the world decide to legislate the protection of Public Interest Witnesses (as the USA did for better or worse), it will be "another day" for humanity.
Sincerely Yours
One of them all