Big Tech whistleblower's parents sue, sounding alarm over son's unexpected death
This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
The parents of a young California tech whistleblower whose 2024 death was ruled a suicide are now suing the City and County of San Francisco, alleging they violated public records laws by refusing to fulfill their requests for information about their son's death.
Suchir Balaji, 26, was an employee at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, at the time of his Nov. 26, 2024, death. A San Francisco County medical examiner concluded the next day he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside his apartment.
"In the two-plus months since their son's passing, Petitioners and their counsel have been stymied at every turn as they have sought more information about the cause of and circumstances surrounding Suchir's tragic death. This petition, they hope, is the beginning of the end of that obstruction," the lawsuit states.
San Francisco City Attorney's Office spokesperson Jen Kwart told Fox News Digital that once their office is served, they will review the complaint and respond accordingly.
"Mr. Balaji's death is a tragedy, and our hearts go out to his family," Kwart said.
"It's really been a nightmare for the last three months for them," one of the family's attorneys, Kevin Rooney, told Fox News Digital.
"We really feel that there's a lot of things that are known to us that are inconsistent with suicide and would suggest … that his death was the result of a homicide."
Just days before he died, Balaji was "upbeat and happy" during a trip to Catalina Island with his friends for his 26th birthday, the complaint filed Jan. 31 says.
The lawsuit describes Balaji as a "child prodigy with a particular interest in and talent for coding." He attended the University of California at Berkeley, and, upon graduating, was hired as an AI researcher at OpenAI.
"In that position, he was integral in OpenAI's efforts to gather and organize data from the internet used to train GPT-4, a language model used by the company's now-ubiquitous online chatbot, ChatGPT," the complaint says.
By August 2024, however, Balaji "had become disillusioned with OpenAI's business practices and decided to leave to pursue his own projects." In October, he was featured in a New York Times article titled "Former Open AI Researcher Says the Company Broke Copyright Law," with his photo.
Balaji alleged that "OpenAI violates United States copyright law because ChatGPT trains on copyrighted products of business competitors and then can imitate and substitute those products, running the risk of reducing the commercial viability of OpenAI's competitors to zero," according to the lawsuit.
In a Jan. 16 statement, OpenAI described Balaji as a "valued member" of the company's team, and its employees are "still heartbroken by his passing."
Balaji's parents, Poornima Ramarao and Bajami Ramamurthy, allege their requests for more information about their son's death were denied unfairly under the California Public Records Act. They further alleged in the lawsuit that investigators did not take their concerns about Balaji's whistleblower status seriously.
Rooney said there are good reasons for investigators not to disclose certain information about a criminal case to the public.
"But you should at least communicate with them and let them know generally what's being done to investigate the case," Rooney said. "And if that hasn't been done here because they've made a conclusion that Suchir died by suicide and that the investigation is closed, well … then we do have a right under the law [to view police records].
"When Ms. Ramarao informed the representative that her son had been a whistleblower against OpenAI and had been featured in the New York Times regarding his whistleblower allegations, the representative declined to follow up or seek any additional information," the lawsuit alleged.
"Instead, the [medical examiner's office] representative handed Ms. Ramarao Suchir's apartment keys and told her she could retrieve her son's body the following day. The representative also told Ms. Ramarao that she should not be allowed to see Suchir's body and that his face had been destroyed when a bullet went through his eye."
Dr. Joseph Cohen, a forensic pathologist hired by Balaji's parents, conducted a private autopsy and noted that Balaji's gunshot wound was "atypical and uncommon in suicides." The 26-year-old also had a contusion on the back of his head, according to the complaint.
Cohen also "noted that the trajectory of the bullet was downward with a slight left to right angle" and "that the bullet completely missed the brain before perforating and lodging in the brain stem."
Fox News Digital reached out to OpenAI for comment.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
"Piracy Is Piracy": Disney Sues Midjourney for Massive Copyright Violation
Disney and NBCUniversal — a pair of media behemoths behind franchises ranging from "Star Wars" and "Toy Story" to "Minions" and "Shrek" — are suing AI company Midjourney, accusing it of enabling copyright infringement on a massive scale through its AI image generator tech. In the lawsuit, which was filed in a California district court today, the two Hollywood juggernauts accused the firm of ignoring its previous requests to stop violating their intellectual property rights. "Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism," the scathing complaint reads, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal. It's a major escalation in the fight between copyright holders and AI firms, a battle that has been brewing for years. Per Axios, it's the "first legal action that major Hollywood studios have taken against a generative AI company." And it's not just the use of image generators; generative AI writ large has triggered a barrage of lawsuits, with media companies accusing the likes of OpenAI and Google of training their large language models on their materials without fair compensation. Those disputes have turned into a major pain point for the AI industry, despite surging enthusiasm for the tech. Considering the sheer size of both Disney and Universal — Disney is the third largest media company by market cap in the world — Midjourney could soon be in a world of hurt. Disney, in particular, has a long track record of closely guarding its enormous cache of intellectual property. "Our world-class IP is built on decades of financial investment, creativity and innovation—investments only made possible by the incentives embodied in copyright law that give creators the exclusive right to profit from their works," said Disney's chief legal compliance officer, Horacio Gutierrez, in a statement. "We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity," he added. "But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it's done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing." The lawsuit explained in an example how Midjourney users could easily request a picture of the Disney-owned "Star Wars" character Darth Vader in a "particular setting or doing a particular action," and the AI "obliges by generating and displaying a high-quality, downloadable image." That kind of loose approach to copyright has been an open secret for quite some time. In January 2024, noted AI critic Gary Marcus and film industry concept artist Reid Southen warned in a piece for IEEE Spectrum that tools like Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E3 could land them in a "copyright minefield." The pair found that it was "easy to generate many plagiaristic outputs, with brief prompts related to commercial films," including well-known Marvel superheroes, Nintendo's Super Mario, and Disney's Darth Vader. Disney and Universal are framing their legal action as a way to "protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us," said NBCU executive VP and general of counsel Kim Harris in the statement. Given the lack of a clear legal precedent, it'll be fascinating to watch the lawsuit unfold over what's likely to turn into a years-long courtroom battle. More on Midjourney: Self-Styled "AI Artist" Furious That People Are "Blatantly Stealing My Work"
CNET
32 minutes ago
- CNET
OpenAI Launches Improved Version of Latest Reasoning Model. Here's What It's Best For
OpenAI this week announced an improved version of its o3 generative AI reasoning model, saying it performed better on benchmarks and is designed to spend more time thinking on difficult problems. The new model, called o3-pro, is now available for Pro and Team users in ChatGPT and API users, and will come to Enterprise and Edu users next week. In its release notes, OpenAI said the model is similar to o1-pro, which users favored for its math, science and coding skills. It incorporates improvements from the newer o3 model, which can search the web and use more reasoning skills. "Because o3-pro has access to tools, responses typically take longer than o1-pro to complete," the company said. "We recommend using it for challenging questions where reliability matters more than speed, and waiting a few minutes is worth the tradeoff." Kevin Weil, OpenAI's chief product officer, posted on X that the company is also dropping the price of o3 in the API by 80%, and that rate limits for o3 will be doubled for Plus users. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) OpenAI continues to build on its latest rounds of updates to its large language models, which rolled out in April. CEO Sam Altman has teased the larger release of an "open-weights" model, a kind of middle ground between open- and closed-source models that provides more insight into how the models work. He doubled down on that teasing this week, posting on X that it would be exptected later in the summer, but not in June. "[O]ur research team did something unexpected and quite amazing and we think it will be very very worth the wait, but needs a bit longer," he said.
Yahoo
43 minutes ago
- Yahoo
CoreWeave to offer compute capacity in Google's new cloud deal with OpenAI, sources say
By Krystal Hu (Reuters) -CoreWeave has emerged as a winner in Google's newly signed partnership with OpenAI, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, in the latest example of the voracious appetite for computing resources in the artificial-intelligence industry and the formation of new alliances to meet them. The so-called neocloud company, which sells cloud computing services built on Nvidia's graphics processing units, is slated to provide computing capacity to Google's cloud unit, and Alphabet's Google will then sell that computing capacity to OpenAI to meet the growing demand for services like ChatGPT, the sources said. Google will also provide some of its own computing resources to OpenAI, added the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters. The details of the arrangement, first reported by Reuters on Tuesday, highlight the evolving dynamics between hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google and so-called neocloud companies like Coreweave. Hyperscalers are large cloud service providers that offer massive-scale data centers and cloud infrastructure. The insatiable hunger for computing resources has generated major investment commitments and turned rivals into partners. Backed by OpenAI and Nvidia, Coreweave signed up Google as a customer in the first quarter. CoreWeave, Google and OpenAI declined to comment. CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider that went public in March, has already been a major supplier of OpenAI's infrastructure. It has signed a five-year contract worth $11.9 billion with OpenAI to provide dedicated computing capacity for OpenAI's model training and inference. OpenAI also took a $350 million equity stake in CoreWeave in March. This partnership was further expanded last month through an additional agreement worth up to $4 billion, extending through April 2029, underscoring OpenAI's escalating demand for high-performance computing resources. Industry insiders say adding Google Cloud as a new customer could help CoreWeave diversify its revenue sources, and having a credible partner with deep pockets like Google enables the startup to secure more favorable financing terms to support ambitious data center buildouts across the country. This could also boost Google's cloud unit, which generated $43 billion in sales last year, allowing it to capitalize on the growth of OpenAI, which is also one of its largest competitors in areas like search and chatbots. It positions Google as a neutral provider of computing resources in competition with peers such as Amazon and Microsoft. CoreWeave's deal with Google coincides with Microsoft's re-evaluation of its data center strategy, including withdrawing from certain data center leases. Microsoft, once Coreweave's largest customer, accounting for about 62% of its 2024 revenue, is also renegotiating with OpenAI to revise the terms of their multibillion-dollar investment, including the future equity stake it will hold in OpenAI. CoreWeave, backed by Nvidia, has established itself as a fast-rising provider of GPU-based cloud infrastructure in the AI wave. While its public debut in March was met with a lukewarm response due to concerns over its highly leveraged capital structure and shifting GPU demand, the company's stock has surged since its IPO price of $40 per share, gaining over 270% and reaching a record high of $166.63 in June. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
