OpenAI whistleblower’s mother alleges potential murder plot, calls for FBI investigation

The mother of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, is calling for an FBI investigation into his death. Poornima Ramarao took to X on Sunday to report that Balaji’s family has hired a private investigator, whose initial findings allegedly cast doubt on a determination by the city’s chief medical examiner that Balaji died by suicide.

Balaji, who was only 26 years old, worked at OpenAI for four years, where he had a key part in collecting the data that would be used to form ChatGPT. He became disillusioned as OpenAI morphed from a non-profit research lab to a commercial venture, however, and resigned in August before going public in a interview with the New York Times alleging mass copyright infringement. The news outlet is currently in a heated legal battle with OpenAI which claims that ChatGPT was trained on its articles without permission.

“Suchir’s apartment was ransacked,” he said place from Ramarao (who goes by the shorter surname ‘Rao’ on X) read. “Sign of a struggle in the bathroom and it looks like someone hit him in the bathroom based on blood stains.” The identity of the X account has not been verified, but it has shared pictures of Balaji that do not appear to have been published elsewhere online. It’s also linked to a GoFundMe account aimed at raising funds for further investigations, which has raised more than $47,000.

Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and is currently involved in his own lawsuit against the AI ​​giant, he answered to Ramarao’s post saying simply, “This doesn’t look like suicide.”

Gizmodo contacted Ramarao for comment but we have not heard back. OpenAI refers to a previous statement expressing condolences to the family.

Update on @suchirbalaji

We hired a private investigator and performed a second autopsy to shed light on the cause of death. The private autopsy did not confirm the cause of death stated by the police.

Suchir’s apartment was ransacked, signs of a struggle in the bathroom and it looks like someone hit 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 interviewed Ramarao after his son’s death, and wrote that Balaji was gifted from a young age and made significant contributions to the training methods and infrastructure of ChatGPT during his time there. In 2022, he was tasked with scraping data from the entire Internet to use in the GPT-4 training, the model that could fuel the launch of ChatGPT at the end of that year.

Considering that OpenAI started Silicon Valley’s generative AI race, Balaji has served as a high-profile whistleblower in the fight over whether AI companies have the right to openly use content from across the web in their products. . It’s a very divisive topic, with media companies claiming outright theft while tech industry insiders accuse it of fair use. At stake are potentially tens of billions of dollars and the future of what some believe is the next major platform shift in technology. The major language models that power models like ChatGPT require an immense amount of training data, mainly written texts, to write like a human and produce answers to any question that is put to them.

It’s no surprise then that Balaji likely faced immense criticism and online bullying after going public with his concerns. Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley has seen how the pressure to succeed can cause major stress and other mental health problems. That does not include other risk factors such as legal problems from making a whistleblower complaint; losing a job and damaging future career prospects; or social isolation from peers in the industry.

Is it possible that Balaji was targeted on his actions? Possibly, but conspiracies are difficult to keep secret, and the dumb answer is often the correct one. It is not that hard to see how everything Balaji was going through could lead to despair. His would not be the first case of a whistleblower in technology who ends his own life because of his moral beliefs – Theranos’ chief scientist, Ian Gibbons, said. took his own life then faced immense pressure from founder and now convicted Elizabeth Holmes for raising concerns about the validity of the company’s blood tests.

It’s not surprising that Balaji’s parents will go to any length, hoping to find answers and in disbelief that they’ve lost their son. Perhaps they find that something more nefarious has happened. But there is no strong reason to believe that is the case at this point. I hope they are able to find the closure they are looking for.