A 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher, Suchir Balaji, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment in recent weeks, CNBC has confirmed.Balaji left OpenAI earlier this year and raised concerns publicly that the company had allegedly violated U.S. copyright law while developing its popular ChatGPT chatbot.
“The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” David Serrano Sewell, executive director of San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, told CNBC in an email on Friday. He said Balaji’s next of kin have been notified. The San Francisco Police Department said in an e-mail that on the afternoon of Nov. 26, officers were called to an apartment on Buchanan Street to conduct a “wellbeing check.” They found a deceased adult male, and discovered “no evidence of foul play” in their initial investigation, the department said.
News of Balaji’s death was first reported by the San Jose Mercury News. A family member contacted by the paper requested privacy.In October, The New York Times published a story about Balaji’s concerns. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji told the paper. He reportedly believed that ChatGPT and other chatbots like it would destroy the commercial viability of people and organizations who created the digital data and content now widely used to train AI systems.
