Suchir Balaji, a former engineer OpenAI which helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT but who later claimed to believe such practices violated copyright law, has diedaccording to his parents and officials San Francisco. He was 26 years old.
Balaji worked at OpenAI for almost four years before resigning in August. He was highly regarded by his colleagues at the San Francisco-based company, where a co-founder this week described him as one of the strongest members of the OpenAI team. and essential for the development of some of its products.
“We are devastated to learn this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” reads a statement from OpenAI.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26 in what police said “appeared to be a suicide.” He added that “during the initial investigation, no evidence was found that he had been murdered.” Forensics confirmed the cause of death as suicide.
Your parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthysaid they are still searching for answers, and described their son as a “happy, smart, brave young man” who loved hiking and had recently returned from a trip with friends.
Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first came to the fledgling AI research lab for a summer internship in 2018 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 the creation of ChatGPT.
“Suchir’s contributions to this project were essential, and it would not have been successful without him,” said OpenAI co-founder, John Schulmanin a social media post in memory of Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said that what made him an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and his ability to notice subtle or logical errors.
“He had a talent for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He thought about the details of things carefully and rigorously.”
Balaji later set about organizing the huge data sets of online writing and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large language model, which served as the basis for the company’s famous chatbot. company. It was that work that eventually led Balaji to question the technology he helped build, especially after newspapers, novelists and others began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.
In the first instance, he raised his concerns with the newspaper The New York Timeswhich included them in a profile of Balaji published in October.
Later, he told The Associated Press that he would try to “testify” in the strongest copyright infringement cases and considered a lawsuit filed by The New York Times last year to be the “most serious.” Lawyers for The New York Times named him in a Nov. 18 court filing as someone who may have “unique and relevant documents” supporting OpenAI’s allegations of willful copyright infringement.
His records were also requested by lawyers in a separate case brought by book authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing.
“It doesn’t feel good 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 one should have the power to do that. I don’t think you can do it legally.”
Balaji told the AP that he had gradually become more disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after internal turmoil that led its board to fire and then rehire CEO Sam Altman last year. Balaji said he was extremely concerned about how his commercial products were being launched, including their propensity to emit false information known as “hallucinations.”
But among the “multiple issues” he was concerned about, he said he was focusing on copyright as the only one about which it was “really possible to do something.”
Balaji acknowledged that his opinion was unpopular within the AI research community, which is used to mining data from the internet, but said “they will have to change and it is a matter of time.”
He had not been questioned and it is unclear to what extent his revelations will be admitted as evidence in any legal case after his death. He also published a personal blog post with his opinions on the topic.
Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji coincidentally left the company on the same day and celebrated that night with colleagues over dinner and drinks at a bar in San Francisco. Another of Balaji’s mentors, the co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskeverhad left OpenAI several months earlier, which Balaji saw as another push to leave.
Schulman said that Balaji had told him earlier this year about his plans to leave OpenAI and that Balaji did not believe it was possible to create higher-than-human artificial intelligence, known as artificial general intelligence “in the short term, as the company seemed to believe.” rest of the company.” The young engineer expressed interest in pursuing a doctorate and exploring “some unusual ideas about how to build intelligence,” Schulman said.
Balaji’s family said a memorial is being planned for later this month at the Indian Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino.