Sachir Balaji, an Ex Open AI Engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence system behind. Chat GPT And later said that, according to his parents and San Francisco officials, he believed the practices violated copyright law, and that he had died. He was 26 years old.
Balaji worked at OpenAI for about four years before leaving in August. He was respected by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI's strongest partners, essential to developing some of its products.
“We are deeply saddened to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Sachir's loved ones at this difficult time,” OpenAI said in a statement.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26 in what police said was “an apparent suicide. An initial investigation found no evidence of foul play. The city's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the manner of death a suicide.” stated.
His parents Purnima Rama Rao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they are still searching for answers, describing their son as a “happy, intelligent and adventurous young man” who loved to hike and recently Returned from a trip with friends.
Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the new AI research lab for a 2018 summer 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 contribution to this project was essential, and it would not have been successful without him,” OpenAI co-founder John Shulman said in a social media post commemorating Balaji. Shulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what made him an exceptional 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 beautiful code that worked,” Shulman wrote. “He will think the details of things carefully and rigorously.”
Balaji later moved on to organizing large datasets of online texts and other media used to train GPT-4, which OpenAI is the fourth generation of the Big Language model and the basis of the company's popular chatbot. It was this work that led Balaji to question the technology he helped build, particularly newspapers, after novelists. And others Started suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.
He first raised his concerns with The New York Times, which reported on him in October. Profile of Balaji.
He later told The Associated Press that he would “try to testify” in the strongest copyright infringement cases and consider it. A case brought by The New York Times called last year “the most sobering ever”. Lawyers for the Times named him in a Nov. 18 court filing as someone who has “unique and relevant documents” supporting OpenAI's allegations of willful copyright infringement.
His records were also requested by lawyers in a separate case brought by the book's authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing.
“It doesn't seem right 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're legally able to do that.
He told the AP that he gradually became more disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after that Internal chaos That led to the firing of its board of directors and then the rehiring of CEO Sam Altman last year. Balaji said he is largely concerned about how his commercial products are being marketed, including their tendency to spread misinformation known as hoaxes.
But of the “bag of issues” he was concerned about, he said he was focusing on copyright because “it's actually possible to do something.”
He acknowledged that this was an unpopular opinion within the AI research community, which is accustomed to pulling data from the Internet, but said “they have to change and it's only a matter of time.”
He was not impeached and it is unclear to what extent his revelations would be admissible as evidence in any legal case after his death. He also published a personal blog post with his opinion on the subject.
Shulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji coincidentally left on the same day and celebrated with colleagues that night at a San Francisco bar with dinner and drinks. Another of Balaji's mentors, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sotskiver, had left OpenAI. Several months agowhich Balaji saw as another motivation to quit.
Shulman said that Balaji told him earlier this year about his plans to leave OpenAI and that Balaji didn't think that better-than-human AI, known as artificial general intelligence, was “just around the corner, As the rest of the company believes,” Shulman said, the young engineer expressed an interest in getting a doctorate and “exploring some more unusual ideas about how to build intelligence.”
A memorial is being planned later this month at the India Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino, Balaji's family said.
and copy 2024 Canadian Press