Elon Musk Reacts After OpenAI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji Found Dead at US Apartment

An Indian-American OpenAI whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, who worked at OpenAI till August 2024, was found dead in his apartment in San Francisco. It is suspected to be a case of suicide. Elon Musk has also reacted to Balaji's death.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently in a legal battle with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, responded to the news with a cryptic 'hmm' post on X (formerly Twitter).

After working at OpenAI for nearly four years, Balaji left the company when he believed the technology would harm society, according to The New York Times. His main concern was OpenAI's use of copyright data, which he thought was damaging to the internet.

“I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them,” said Balaji in a tweet from October.

“I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they’re trained on," he wrote on X.

Though OpenAI and its partner Microsoft argue that their practices fall under the 'fair use' doctrine, which allows limited use of copyrighted material for transformative purposes, Balaji disagreed.

He believed that even though AI-generated content doesn’t directly copy data, it still too closely resembles the original works, undermining creators.

At OpenAI, Balaji initially worked on WebGPT, a version of GPT-3 designed to search the web, which later influenced the development of SearchGPT. He also contributed to the pretraining team for GPT-4, the reasoning team for o1, and post-training for ChatGPT, as per his LinkedIn profile.