Indian-American Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI employee who worked there until August 2024, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. The death is suspected to be a suicide. Elon Musk has also reacted to the news of Balaji's passing.

The revelation was met by a mysterious 'hmm' post on X (previously Twitter) from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently embroiled in a legal dispute with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. After nearly four years at OpenAI, Balaji decided to leave because he believed the technology could harm society, as reported by The New York Times. His primary concern was OpenAI's use of copyrighted data, which he felt was harmful to the internet. “I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them,” said Balaji in a tweet from October.

“I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defence 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," he wrote on X. OpenAI and Microsoft claim their use of copyrighted material is covered by 'fair use,' which permits limited use of content for transformative purposes. However, Balaji disagreed, arguing that even if AI-generated content doesn’t copy directly, it closely mirrors the original works, harming creators.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Balaji started at OpenAI by working on WebGPT, a web-search-enabled version of GPT-3 that later inspired SearchGPT. He also contributed to the GPT-4 pretraining team, worked on the reasoning team for o1, and assisted with ChatGPT's post-training.