WHISTLEBLOWER FOUND DEAD
A researcher at OpenAI who turned whistleblower has been found dead. Suchir Balaji’s body was discovered on 26 November.
Police received a call asking officers to check on the 26-year-old. When they visited his apartment, they found his body.
According to the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s office, the cause of his death has been determined as suicide. They couldn’t find any evidence of foul play.
Balaji revealed details about OpenAI’s practices regarding data-gathering. The artificial intelligence company is currently embattled in various lawsuits relating to the topic.
During an interview between Balaji and the New York Times published in October, Balaji alleged that OpenAI had violated US copyright law while it developed its very popular ChatGPT online chatbot.
Although OpenAI says its models are “trained on publicly available data” several news publishers in the US and Canada recently filed lawsuits claiming the company was illegally using news articles to train its software.
The BBC reports that in November, OpenAI said its software is “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation”.
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