Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI Engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind them 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 almost four years before quitting in August. He was well respected by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week described him as one of OpenAI’s strongest contributors, crucial to the development of some of its products.
“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news, and our thoughts are with Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” OpenAI said in a statement.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26. Police said it appeared to be a suicide. The initial investigation found no evidence of foul play.” The city’s chief medical examiner confirmed that the cause of death was suicide.
His parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, said they were still searching for answers and described their son as a “happy, smart and courageous young man” who enjoyed hiking and had recently returned from a trip with friends.
Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first came to the young AI research lab for a summer internship in 2018 while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. A few years later, he returned 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 crucial, and without him it would not have been successful,” said OpenAI co-founder John Schulman in a social media post commemorating Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what made him such an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and his ability to spot subtle errors or logical errors.
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“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He would think through the details of things carefully and thoroughly.”
Balaji later turned his attention to organizing the massive data sets of online fonts and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large language model and a foundation for the company’s famous chatbot. It was this work that eventually led Balaji to question the technology he helped develop, particularly after newspapers and novelists and other began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.
He first expressed his concerns to the New York Times, which reported on them in October Profile of Balaji.
He later told the Associated Press that he would “try to testify in the most serious copyright infringement cases” and was considering whether Lawsuit filed by The New York Times was the “most serious” last year. Lawyers for the Times named him in a Nov. 18 court filing as someone who may have “unique and relevant documents” that support allegations of intentional copyright infringement by OpenAI.
His records were also obtained by attorneys in a separate case involving book authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing.
“It doesn’t feel right to train on people’s data and then compete with them in the market,” Balaji told the AP in late October. “I don’t think you should be able to do that. I don’t think you can do that legally.”
He told the AP that he became increasingly disillusioned with OpenAI, especially afterward the inner restlessness This led the board to fire and then rehire CEO Sam Altman last year. Balaji said he was broadly concerned about the rollout of his commercial products, including their propensity to spread false information, so-called hallucinations.
Of the “issues” that worried him, he said he was focusing on copyright because it was “actually possible to do something about it.”
He acknowledged that this was an unpopular opinion within the AI research community, which is used to pulling data from the internet, but said: “They have to change and it’s a matter of time.”
He had not been deposed and it is unclear to what extent his revelations after his death will be admitted as evidence in court proceedings. He also published a personal blog post with his opinion on the topic.
Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji happened to leave on the same day and celebrated with colleagues that evening with dinner and drinks at a bar in San Francisco. Another of Balaji’s mentors, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, had left OpenAI several months earlierwhich Balaji saw as another impetus to leave.
Schulman said Balaji told him earlier this year about his plans to leave OpenAI, and that Balaji did not believe that a superhuman AI known as artificial general intelligence was “just around the corner, as the rest of the company seemed to believe.” ” .” The younger engineer expressed interest in pursuing a doctorate and exploring “some off-the-beaten-path ideas about building intelligence,” Schulman said.
Balaji’s family said a memorial service is planned for later this month at the India Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino.
&Copy 2024 The Canadian Press
