Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former OpenAI artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, was discovered dead in his San Francisco apartment yesterday. The way AI businesses handle copyright content and exploit data has always raised concerns.
Balaji, an Indian American engineer who once worked with OpenAI, from November 2020 to August 2024, raised attention to one such instance. He had experience with ChatGPT and OpenAI. He had openly voiced concerns about OpenAI violating copyright laws after departing the latter. He accused the company of using copyrighted material to train its AI models, including ChatGPT.
“I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them,” said Balaji in a post October. “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.” he stated earlier.
Many of Balaji’s former coworkers and OpenAI staff expressed their grief over his passing. Police say they did not find any signs of foul play during the initial inquiry.
