Suspicious OpenAI Whistleblower Death Ruled Suicide

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By Tyler Durde - Sunday, Dec 15, 2024 - 11:35 PM

According to the NY Times;

He came to the conclusion that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet.

In August, he left OpenAI because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he said during a recent series of interviews with The New York Times.

The Times named Balaji a person with "unique and relevant documents" that the outlet would use in their ongoing litigation with OpenAI - which claims that the company, and its partner Microsoft, are using the world of reporters and editors without permission.

In an October post to X, Balaji wrote: "I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them. I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. 

When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on. I've written up the more detailed reasons for why I believe this in my post. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but I still feel like it's important for even non-lawyers to understand the law – both the letter of it, and also why it's actually there in the first place."

He then made a lengthy post on his personal blog outlining why he thinks OpenAI violates Fair Use. Four weeks later he was dead.

Balaji, who grew up in Cupertino, California, studied computer science at UC Berkeley - telling the Times that he wanted to use AI to help society.

"I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them," he told the outlet.

But in 2022, after two years with OpenAI, Balaji grew concerned over the data he was assigned to gather for the company's GPT-4 program, which was trained on virtually the entire internet. He told the Times that this violated US "fair use" laws.

"Microsoft and OpenAI simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers — all without any regard for the efforts, much less the legal rights, of those who create and publish the news on which local communities rely," the Times said in its lawsuit.

OpenAI has refuted the claims, saying all of its work is covered under fair use.

"We see immense potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience," the company said.

NEWS


OpenAI whistleblower who died was being considered as witness against company

Suchir Balaji, listed in court filing as having ‘relevant documents’ about copyright violation, died on 26 November

Associated PressSat 21 Dec 2024 20.33 GMTShare

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26.

Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He had been well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI’s strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products.

“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” said a statement from OpenAI.

Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on 26 November in what police said “appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.” The city’s chief medical examiner’s office confirmed the manner of death to be suicide.

His parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, said they are still seeking answers, describing their son as a “happy, smart and brave young man” who loved to hike and recently had returned from a trip with friends.

Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the fledgling AI research lab for a 2018 summer internship while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned a few years later to work at OpenAI, where one of his first projects, called WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT.

“Suchir’s contributions to this project were essential, and it wouldn’t have succeeded without him,” said OpenAI co-founder John Schulman in a social media post memorializing Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what had made him such an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and ability to notice subtle bugs or logical errors.

“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He’d think through the details of things carefully and rigorously.”

Balaji later shifted to organizing the huge datasets of online writings and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large language model and a basis for the company’s famous chatbot. It was that work that eventually caused Balaji to question the technology he helped build, especially after newspapers, novelists and others began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.

He first raised his concerns with the New York Times, which reported them in an October profile of Balaji.

He later told the Associated Press he would “try to testify” in the strongest copyright infringement cases and considered a lawsuit brought by the New York Times last year to be the “most serious”. Times lawyers named him in an 18 November court filing as someone who might have “unique and relevant documents” supporting allegations of OpenAI’s willful copyright infringement.

His records were also sought by lawyers in a separate case brought by book authors including the comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing.

“It doesn’t feel right to be training on people’s data and then competing with them in the marketplace,” Balaji told the AP in late October. “I don’t think you should be able to do that. I don’t think you are able to do that legally.”

He told the AP that he had grown gradually more disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after the internal turmoil that led its board of directors to fire and then rehire the CEO, Sam Altman, last year. Balaji said he was broadly concerned about how its commercial products were rolling out, including their propensity for spouting false information known as hallucinations.

But of the “bag of issues” he was concerned about, he said, he was focusing on copyright as the one it was “actually possible to do something about”.

He acknowledged that it was an unpopular opinion within the AI research community, which is accustomed to pulling data from the internet, but said “they will have to change and it’s a matter of time”.

He had not been deposed and it’s unclear to what extent his revelations will be admitted as evidence in any legal cases after his death. He also published a personal blog post with his opinions about the topic.

Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji coincidentally left on the same day and celebrated with fellow colleagues that night with dinner and drinks at a San Francisco bar. Another of Balaji’s mentors, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, had left OpenAI several months earlier, which Balaji saw as another impetus to leave.

Schulman said Balaji had told him earlier this year of his plans to leave OpenAI and that Balaji didn’t think that better-than-human AI known as artificial general intelligence “was right around the corner, like the rest of the company seemed to believe”. The younger engineer expressed interest in getting a doctorate and exploring “some more off-the-beaten-path ideas about how to build intelligence”, Schulman said.

Balaji’s family said a memorial is being planned for later this month at the India Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino.

FOLLOW THE TRAIL. QUE BONO?

Why are the police not confirming manner of death? They just confirmed suicide by his own hands.