THE PARENTS OF SUCHIR BALAJI ARE CALLING FOR A FEDERAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE DEATH OF THEIR SON WHO WAS FOUND DEAD ONLY MONTHS AFTER BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON OPENAI.
The sweetest person. A prodigy at the age of 14.
That's how Poornima Ramarao describes her son, Suchir Balaji, the now deceased whistleblower who recently made waves after he publicly spoke out against his former employer, OpenAI.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on the 26th of November. San Francisco police discovered his body after his family requested a wellness check because they could not contact him. The San Francisco medical examiner's office quickly deemed the death a suicide and police claimed there were no signs of foul play.
Poornimao as well as Suchir's father, Balaji Ramamurthy, were immediately skeptical of the claim of suicide and begin their own investigation into their son's death. They were especially concerned because Suchir recently went public as a whistleblower against his former employer, OpenAI.
Suchir was helping OpenAI develop their popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence app when he grew disillusioned with what he claimed were ethical violations. He was working as a senior member of the WebGPT project which turned into ChatGPT. Suchir would also help train ChatGPT in his final months at OpenAI.
By late October he published an essay on his website expressing his concerns that ChatGPT was improperly being trained by on copyrighted material. That same day The New York Times released an interview with him detailing concerns. He told the Times that he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed could harm society.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told The New York Times.
His mother says after he quit OpenAI she warned him about speaking out on his own, fearing that he might have trouble finding a new job. However, Suchir told his mother he was planning on launching a startup company. He was also slated to be a central witness in The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
"We have yet to uncover what made him go to New York Times to speak against them. Was he trying to protect himself by going public? We need to explore that," Poornimao Rao told The Last American Vagabond. "But he did go to New York Times on October 23rd and he publicly said OpenAI is violating copyright data."
One way or the other, by November 26th, Suchir was dead by an alleged suicide.
Signs of a Struggle Debunk the Suicide Claim
His mother says the family paid for a second private autopsy which revealed that Suchir was shot on the left side of his head. The family also discovered signs of struggle, including multiple pools of blood.
"Then how is that possible in a suicide, right?," she asked.
"And also the angle of the bullet was not, it's not suicidal at all. It was a downward angle at the middle of the forehead.... (Continue Reading...)
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/openai-whistleblower-family/