Former OpenAI developer who raised legal concerns about technology he helped build has died – National
Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and publisher who helped train the artificial intelligence programs behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26 years old.
Balaji worked at OpenAI for about four years before quitting in August. He was well-regarded by his colleagues at the San Francisco company, where one founder this week called him one of OpenAI's most powerful contributors who were instrumental in developing some of its products.
“We are deeply saddened to hear of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones at this difficult time,” said a statement from OpenAI.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26 in what police said “appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.” The medical examiner's office in this city has confirmed that the manner in which the person died was suicide.
His parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they are still looking for answers, describing their son as a “happy, intelligent and brave young man” who loved hiking and had just returned from a trip with friends.
Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first came to the fledgling AI research center for a summer 2018 internship while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned a few years later to work at OpenAI, where one of his first projects, called WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT.
“Suchir's contributions to this project were invaluable, and it would not have been possible without him,” OpenAI co-founder John Schulman said in a social media post commemorating Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said that what made him an outstanding engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and ability to spot subtle bugs or logical errors.
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“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing good code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He thought about the details of things carefully and meticulously.”
Balaji later switched to organizing large datasets of online texts and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI's flagship language model and the basis of the company's popular chatbot. It was that work that eventually caused Balaji to question the technology he helped build, especially after newspapers, bloggers and others began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.
He first raised his concerns with The New York Times, which reported on them in an October profile of Balaji.
He later told the Associated Press that he would “try to testify” in the most serious cases of copyright infringement and considered the case filed by the New York Times last year to be “very serious.” Attorneys for the Times represented him in court on November 18 as a possible possessor of “unique and important documents” supporting allegations of willful copyright infringement by OpenAI.
His records were also sought by lawyers in a separate lawsuit brought by the authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, according to the court filing.
“It doesn't make sense to train on people's data and then compete with them in the marketplace,” Balaji told the AP in late October. “I don't think you should be able to do that. I don't think you can legally do that.”
He told the AP that he gradually grew disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after the internal turmoil that led to its board of directors firing and rehiring CEO Sam Altman last year. Balaji said he was very concerned about the way his products started, including their tendency to produce false information known as hallucinations.
But as for the “bag of problems” he was concerned about, he said he was focusing on copyright as a “fact that something could be done about it.”
He acknowledged that it was an unpopular idea in the AI research community, which tends to extract information from the Internet, but said “they will have to change and it's only a matter of time.”
He has not yet been impeached and it is unclear whether his revelations will be accepted as evidence in any posthumous cases. He also published personal blog posts with his thoughts on the topic.
Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji were lucky enough to leave on the same day and celebrate with colleagues that night over dinner and drinks at a San Francisco bar. One of Balaji's mentors, founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, had left OpenAI a few months earlier, which Balaji saw as another development to leave.
Schulman said Balaji told him earlier this year about his plans to leave OpenAI and that Balaji didn't think the superhuman AI known as artificial general intelligence “just existed, as the rest of the company seems to believe.” .” The young engineer expressed interest in getting a doctorate and exploring “some of the less extreme ideas about how to build intelligence,” Schulman said.
Balaji's family said a memorial is being planned for later this month at the India Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino.
© 2024 The Canadian Press
