Mother of Deceased OpenAI Whistleblower Says He May Have Murdered, Wants FBI to Investigate

The mother of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, wants the FBI to investigate his death. Poornima Ramarao took to X on Sunday to announce that Balaji’s family had hired a private investigator, whose findings cast doubt on the city medical examiner’s conclusion that Balaji died by suicide.

Balaji, who was only 26 years old, worked at OpenAI for four years, where he played a key role in collecting the data that will be used to train ChatGPT. He was disappointed when OpenAI went from a non-profit laboratory to a commercial enterprise, however, and resigned in August before going public. interview and New York Times alleging violations of the rights of many people. This article is at the center of a major legal dispute with OpenAI claiming that ChatGPT has been trained on its content without permission.

“Suchir’s house was robbed,” a post and Ramarao (who goes by the short name “Rao” on X) reads. “The sign of a fight in the bathroom and it looks like someone beat him in the bathroom judging by the bloodstains.” The identity of the X account has not been verified, but it shared photos of Balaji that do not appear to have been posted anywhere else online. It also linked to a GoFundMe account aimed at raising money for further research, which has raised more than $47,000.

Elon Musk, who founded OpenAI and is currently suing the AI ​​giant, he answered to Ramarao’s post saying simply, “This doesn’t look like suicide.”

Gizmodo contacted Ramarao for a reply but we have not heard back. OpenAI specifies a previous words condolences to the family.

A change has been made @suchirbalaji

We hired a private investigator and conducted a second autopsy to determine the cause of death. A private investigation has not confirmed the cause of death reported by police.

Suchir’s house has been robbed, a sign of fighting in the bathroom and it looks like someone has beaten him…

– Poornima Rao (@RaoPoornima) December 29, 2024

Balaji started working at OpenAI as an intern in 2018 and joined the company full time in 2021. Business Insider he was asked Ramarao after his son’s death, and wrote that Balaji was gifted from an early age and contributed greatly to ChatGPT’s teaching methods and infrastructure during his time there. In 2022 he was tasked with extracting data from the Internet to use in training GPT-4, a model that would help implement ChatGPT later that year.

Given that OpenAI has leapfrogged Silicon Valley’s AI race, Balaji has become a prominent whistleblower in the fight over whether AI companies have the right to use internet content in their products. It’s a very divisive topic, with media companies allegedly stealing the truth while techies use it fairly. At stake are billions of dollars and the future of what some believe is the next technological revolution. Large language programs such as ChatGPT require a lot of training, especially text, to write like a human and provide answers to every question they can answer.

OpenAI and other companies in this area have not been transparent about their studies, keeping data private and locked with a key. But their crawlers have been found crawling web pages, causing platforms like Reddit and X to crash, and many brands rely on public databases of digital information including Wikipedia and Common Crawl, a database of more than 250 billion pages. collected since 2007. Balaji was not a whistleblower per se, as this was well known. But since he was an insider of OpenAI it worried him a lot.

It is not surprising that Balaji must have faced a lot of criticism and abuse on the internet after he voiced his concerns. Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley has seen how the pressure to succeed can lead to high levels of stress and other psychological problems. This does not include other risks such as legal issues in making false complaints; losing a job and damaging future employment prospects; or isolation from peers in the industry.

Is it possible that Balaji was only thinking about his actions? Maybe, but plots are hard to hide, and the vague answer is often the right one. It’s not hard to see how everything Balaji was going through would make him pessimistic. His would not be the first whistleblower in technology to end their life because of their ethical beliefs – Theranos’ chief scientist, Ian Gibbons, says. took his own life Following intense pressure from founder and now defendant Elizabeth Holmes for voicing concerns that the company’s blood testing is appropriate.

It is not surprising that Balaji’s parents would do what they can, hoping for answers and disbelieving that their son is dead. Maybe they will find out that something really bad happened. But there is no reason to believe that this is the case now. Hopefully, he can get the closure he wants.