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- How Did Suchir Balaji Die?
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We need to talk about this.
It’s been a month since 26-year-old OpenAI whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment.
Raised in Cupertino, California, Suchir was a bright student who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021.
Suchir spent nearly 4 years as an AI researcher at OpenAI where he helped gather and organize internet data to train the company’s most popular tool, ChatGPT. In August 2024, he left the company and publicly denounced that the company violated the United States copyright laws.
If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company.
In his last blog post in October, Suchir talks about how ChatGPT violates the principle of fair use.
The San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office reports that Suchir died by suicide and that there was no evidence of foul play as per the initial investigation.
Meanwhile, his parents - Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy - still seek answers. They describe Suchir as a “happy, smart and brave young man.”
Apart from openly criticizing OpenAI on his blog, his X handle, and a New York Times interview, he was also ready to testify against the company in the strongest copyright infringement cases.
Co-founder of OpenAI, John Schulman, who left the company in August, wrote a heartfelt tribute for Suchir on LinkedIn.
Suchir had certain traits that made him exceptional as an ML engineer and scientist. He had exceptional attention to detail, which led him to notice subtle bugs or logical errors that would cause incorrect or misleading results. He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked. He’d think through the details of things carefully and rigorously. He stood out as one of the strongest contributors even at OpenAI, which was already a highly select group.
It’s so unfortunate that we lost such a bright mind at such a young age. Suchir, unlike many others in his company, did not believe that AGI was around the corner. He wanted to pursue a Ph.D. and try some unconventional methods to explore intelligence.
It must be made clearer by all means possible to Suchir’s family, if not the world, as to what made the young man who was actively interviewing and blogging in October commit suicide just a month later.
His family is organizing a memorial for him later in December at the India Community Center in Milpitas, California, near his hometown.
RIP Suchir.
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