Suchir Balaji, an Indian-origin researcher living in America, has died under suspicious circumstances. He was a former researcher at OpenAI, on which ChatGPT is based. However, before his death, Balaji had become quite vocal against OpenAI, calling OpenAI dangerous for society. Also, OpenAI was accused of breaking copyright law. Only after this he was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. His death remains a topic of discussion. San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner says that Suchir has committed suicide. Who was Suchir Balaji? Suchir Balaji was a student of the University of California, from where he studied Computer Science. Also did internship in OpenAI and Scale AI. He was among the developers who created ChatGPT. After spending four years at OpenAI, Suchir realized that this technology was going to cause more harm than good to the society. In such a situation, he distanced himself from OpenAI. Suchir’s statement increased concerns about AI. Suchir’s statement and then his death have sparked a debate about AI. Suchir said that false and copyrighted data has been used to develop generative AI, which is not a fair practice. Let us tell you that many types of cases are going on against generative AI companies. Balaji had advised machine learning researchers to be aware of copyright. There was an allegation of wrongful data collection. Balaji’s story was recently published in the New York Times newspaper, in which generative and fair use were mentioned. In this interview, he explained in detail how OpenAI collects data in a dangerous manner. He had expressed concern about the use of internet data on a large scale during the training of GPT-4. Balaji had given information regarding this by writing a post on social media platform X.
