• Source:JND
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Suchir Balaji, an Indian American OpenAI researcher, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. The San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said that the manner of the death has been determined to be suicide; however, the officials found no evidence at his apartment. 

The 26-year-old techie raised concerns about the challenges associated with artificial intelligence and OpenAI breaking copyright law in an interview with the New York Times in October. Balaji worked as a researcher at OpenAI and quit the company earlier this year. He became a vocal critic of the firm after leaving and regularly accused the company of violating copyright law by imitating online data. 

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In fact, in his last social media post too, Balaji stated that he got curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against the GenAI companies. “I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc., but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies,” he wrote. 

“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.” Balaji added. 

Who was Suchir Balaji? 
Balaji completed his graduation in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and interned with OpenAI. He started working as a software engineer at Quora in August 2016 and then worked as a machine learning intern at OpenAI. He then joined ScaleAI as an intern in machine learning and interned with Helia too. He was working as a member of the technical staff at OpenAI since November 2020 before quitting the firm in August this year.

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At OpenAI, Balaji used to work on data and also did data-based research for the firm. However, he quit the firm after pondering what OpenAI was doing and reached the conclusion that the firm was violating the copyright laws and it could have bad long-term effects. Many of the prominent personalities, including Elon Musk have reacted to Balaji's death. While sharing one of the posts related to his death, Musk wrote "hmm".