OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead in San Francisco Apartment in Apparent Suicide – BitRss

Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old ex-employee of OpenAI who went public with allegations that the company unethically used data to train its artificial intelligence platform, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment in an apparent suicide, according to a report by Techcrunch. 

Balaji worked as a researcher for the OpenAI technical staff from November 2020 to August 2024. He made headlines in an interview with the New York Times when he said he helped OpenAI use enormous amounts of data gathered from the Internet to train ChatGPT without permission, leading up to its public launch in November 2022. Among other allegations, the Times reported that the company created its own transcription software, which it ran on YouTube to harvest data.

“I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc., but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies,” Balaji posted on X in October. “When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty im…