Former OpenAI engineer who raised legal concerns about technology he helped build dies – National

Suchir Balaji, Ex OpenAI an engineer and informant who helps train AI systems behind it ChatGPT and later said he believed the practices violated copyright law, he died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26 years old.

Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He is well-regarded by his colleagues at the San Francisco company, where the co-founder this week named him one of OpenAI’s strongest contributors, essential to developing some of its products.

“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones at this difficult time,” OpenAI said in a statement.

Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26 in what police said “appeared to be a suicide. An initial investigation found no evidence of foul play.” The city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner confirmed the death as a suicide.

His parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, said they were still searching for answers and described their son as a “happy, intelligent and brave young man” who loved to travel and had recently returned from a trip with friends.

Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first came to the fledgling artificial intelligence research lab for a summer internship in 2018 while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. A few years later, he returned to work at OpenAI, where one of his first projects, WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT.

“Suchir’s contributions to this project were critical and would not have been successful 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 such an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and his ability to spot subtle errors or logical fallacies.

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“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He would think carefully and seriously about the details of everything.”

Balaji then moved on to organizing large datasets of online posts and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large language model and the basis of the company’s popular chatbot. It was this work that ultimately led Balaji to question the technology he had helped build, especially after newspapers, novelists. and others It has begun suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.

He first aired his concerns to The New York Times in October Profile of Balaji.

He later told The Associated Press that he would “try to testify” in the strongest copyright infringement cases. the suit filed by The New York Times was “most serious” last year. Times lawyers cited him in a Nov. 18 lawsuit as someone who may have “unique and relevant documents” supporting OpenAI’s claims of willful copyright infringement.

His records were also sought by attorneys in a separate case brought by the book’s authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, according to the lawsuit.

“It’s not right to train on people’s data and then compete with them in the market,” Balaji told the AP in late October. “I think you should be able to do it. I don’t think you can legally do that.”

He told the AP that he had grown increasingly disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after that inner turmoil It forced the board to resign and rehired CEO Sam Altman last year. Balaji said he is widely concerned about the tendency of commercial products to spread false information, including what is known as hallucinations.

But of the “bag of issues” that concerned him, he said, he focused on copyright where “something could actually be done.”

He acknowledged that this is an unpopular opinion within the AI ​​research community, which is accustomed to getting information from the Internet, but “they will have to change, and it’s only a matter of time,” he said.

He has not been removed from office, and it is unclear to what extent his revelations will be admissible as evidence in any legal case after his death. He also published a personal blog post expressing his thoughts on the subject.

Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he coincidentally left on the same day as Balaji, and that night they celebrated with colleagues over dinner and drinks at a San Francisco bar. Balaji’s other mentor, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI. a few months agothis Balaji saw as another push to leave.

Schulman said that Balaji told him of his plans to leave OpenAI earlier this year, and that Balaji doesn’t think better-than-human AI, known as artificial general intelligence, “is around the corner, as the rest of the company believes.” Schulman said the young engineer expressed interest in pursuing a doctorate and exploring “more unconventional ways of thinking about how to build intelligence.”

Balaji’s family said a memorial service will be held later this month at the Indian Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino.

© 2024 The Canadian Press