'He Was Not Okay With OpenAI Becoming For-Profit': Claims Suchir Balaji's Mother, Elon Musk Reacts

San Francisco: Close to two months ago, 26-year-old OpenAI Whistleblower, Suchir Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment under mysterious circumstances; while initially his death was termed as a suicide, his family and some investigative journalists believe it to be a murder. Suchir Balaji's mother, Poornima Rao, in a recent interview, has claimed that her son was not okay with OpenAI becoming ‘for-profit’. Her interview has been reshared by Elon Musk who has also reacted to it amid his feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

‘He Was Not Okay with OpenAI Becoming For-Profit’: Suchir Balaji's Mother

Poornima Rao, Suchir Balaji's mother who has been raising her voice against OpenAI and claiming her son's death to be a murder, has recently made shocking claims in a fresh interview. In a conversation with Mario Nawfal, the OpenAI whistleblower's mother said that her son had joined OpenAI with the belief to help humanity and was not okay with the organisation becoming for-profit.

Suchir Balaji's mother said, “The reason he joined OpenAI was his belief that AI will help humanity. He was very impressed with OpenAI initially because they were nonprofit. That's when his concern started to arise, and he started questioning himself.”

Elon Musk Reshares Interview of Suchir Balaji's Mother, Reacts To Her Shocking Claims

Poornima Rao's interview clip where she is claiming that her son was not happy with OpenAI becoming for-profit, reached Elon Musk as well who shared it on ‘X’ (formerly known as Twitter). Along with the reshare, he reacted to it with two exclamation marks, ‘!!’.

‘Suchir Balaji Was A Genius’: OpenAI Whistleblower's Mother

In the same interview, Suchir Balaji's mother talked about how her son was a genius. She said, “When he was in high school, for 2 years, every weekend, day and night, he was practicing algorithms. He downloaded data related to machine learning from many different universities. Way before anyone else knew about AI, he was already a champion in machine learning and algorithms. At the age of 11, he started programming. Within 6 months, he used to ask me questions that I could not answer on algorithms.”

‘No Acknowledgement from OpenAI of His Contributions’

In her interview, Suchir Balaji's mother also expressed her sadness because OpenAI never recognised or appreciated her son for his work and contribution to the company, not even after his unfortunate death. She said, “He did something to fine-tune ChatGPT that made it faster and more efficient. But what bothered him was that there was no recognition for his work until he passed away. Even now, there's no acknowledgement from OpenAI of his contributions. That's very unfortunate.”

Suchir Balaji's Mother Alleges Murder of Her Son

Amid reports about Suchir Balaji Death Case being a suicide, the 26-year-old boy's mother Poornima Rao has claimed her son's death to be a ‘cold-blooded murder declared by authorities as suicide’. She further claimed that there was a stark difference between the initial police report and a private autopsy report, that her son's apartment was ransacked and that there were signs of struggle in the bathroom suggesting he was hit and this is not a suicide, but a case of murder.

‘This Doesn’t Seems A Suicide': Elon Musk

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has responded to the plea made by the mother of OpenAi Whistleblower Suchir Balaji saying that, “This doesn't seems a suicide”, in which she called for an FBI investigation following her son's death. Balaji accused the AI gaint of copyright violations, and he was found dead a month after the allegations surfaced.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, his mother, Poornima Ramarao, revealed that they had hired a private investigator and conducted a second autopsy to further investigate the cause of death. According to Ramarao, the private autopsy did not confirm the police's conclusion. In her post, she tagged billionaire Elon Musk and Indian-American tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom will join the incoming Donald Trump administration and are key ally of president-elect. Mr. Musk, known for his ongoing feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, replied to her post, stating, “This doesn't seem like a suicide.”

Suchir Balaji Case: Controversy Surrounding Indian-American's Death

Indian-American tech researcher Suchir Balaji, 26, who openly criticized the use of copyrighted data in artificial intelligence (AI), was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. Balaji, a computer science graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, had interned with OpenAI and Scale AI during his college years. He joined OpenAI in 2019 and during his four years at the company, he worked on several projects, including GPT-4 training and improving ChatGPT’s performance. He left OpenAI in August this year, expressing concerns over the potential harm OpenAI could cause. During his tenure, he played a significant role in data collection for OpenAI's flagship product, ChatGPT. On his personal website, Mr. Balaji elaborated on his concerns, claiming that OpenAI's method of copying data for training its models potentially amounted to copyright infringement.

Just a day before his death, Balaji’s name was mentioned in a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. Though details about his involvement remain unclear, his public criticism of the company’s data usage practices likely drew attention to his stance on ethical AI development. Suchir Balaji had accused OpenAI of training its AI models on copyrighted material scraped from the internet without proper authorization, a practice he argued was detrimental. "If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company," Mr. Balaji said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year. The Indian-origin tech professional resigned from OpenAI in October 2023 after nearly four years with the company.

Balaji was outspoken about what he called OpenAI’s misuse of copyrighted materials to train generative AI models. In October, he posted on X (formerly Twitter), “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 also criticized the company’s reliance on ‘fair use’ as a defense, arguing in a blog post cited by the Chicago Tribune that the training of AI systems like ChatGPT raised significant legal and ethical concerns. “No known factors seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data,” he wrote.