Suchir Balaji, an elder OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. 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 company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI’s most important contributors, essential 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 in what police said “appeared to be a suicide.” No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation. The city’s chief medical examiner’s office confirmed it was a suicide.
His parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they were still searching for answers, describing their son as a “happy, intelligent and courageous young man” who loved hiking and who recently returned from a trip with friends.
Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the brand-new AI research lab for a 2018 summer internship while studying computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. He returned a few years later 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 essential, and it would not have succeeded without him,” John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI, said in a social media post in memory of 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 notice subtle bugs or logical errors.
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“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He thought about the details of things with care and rigor.”
Balaji then turned his attention to organizing the massive datasets of online writings and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large language model and a basis for the famous company chatbot. It was this work that ultimately 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.
He first raised his concerns with The New York Times, which reported on them in an October issue. 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 a lawsuit brought by The New York Times last year was considered “the most serious.” The Times’ lawyers 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 sought by lawyers in a separate case brought by book authors including comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing.
“It doesn’t seem right to train on people’s data and then compete with them in the marketplace,” 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 this legally.
He told the AP that he gradually became more and more disappointed with OpenAI, especially after internal turmoil which led its board to fire and then rehire CEO Sam Altman last year. Balaji said he was generally concerned about the way his commercial products were deployed, including their propensity to spread false information known as hallucinations.
But among the “bundle of issues” that concerned him, he said he focused on copyright as one where it was “actually possible to do something.”
He acknowledged that this was an unpopular opinion within the AI research community, accustomed to mining data from the Internet, but said that “they will have to change and that’s just one question of time.”
He has not been deposed and it is unclear to what extent his revelations will be admitted as evidence in possible legal proceedings following his death. He also published a personal blog post with his opinions on the subject.
Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji happened to leave on the same day and celebrated that evening with their colleagues over dinner and drinks at a bar in San Francisco. Another of Balaji’s mentors, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, had left OpenAI a few months earlierwhich Balaji saw as another impulse to leave.
Schulman said Balaji told him earlier this year of his intention to leave OpenAI and that Balaji didn’t think better-than-human AI, known as artificial general intelligence, “was around the corner.” the street, as the rest of the company seemed to believe. .” The young engineer expressed interest in earning a doctorate and exploring “other outside-the-box ideas about how to develop intelligence,” Schulman said.
Balaji’s family said a memorial was planned for later this month at the Indian Community Center in Milpitas, Calif., not far from his hometown of Cupertino.
© 2024 The Canadian Press