Suchir Balaji, 26, OpenAI researcher and whistleblower, found dead in his San Francisco apartment late November 2024; authorities ruled it a suicide
Balaji alleged OpenAI used copyrighted data in ChatGPT’s development, claiming this practice harmed the Internet.
About a year after his death, Tucker Carlson published an hour-long video interview with OpenAI founder Sam Altman, where he confronted Altman on the death of Suchir Balaji and pressed him on other AI-related questions.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0el3r2nlkoOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
If you doubt that Balaji killed himself, that's the point. They want you to know they killed him, and they want you to know that you can't prove it so there's nothing you can do about it. They want you to know it so that you will think twice should you ever consider blowing a whistle.
Would you die for the truth?
Fuck no. I got a family that depends on me. Especially for some nonsense that oligarchs are getting away with? Like anyone is going to do something about it.
Learned helplessness
That’s not what learned helplessness is.
Would you mind explaining this further? I’m not sure that I see this as learned helplessness, so I’m curious why you categorized this way.
Not exactly. Learned helplessness occurs when the subject doesn't even consider the possibility of helping themselves even after the threat of punishment is removed. We live under the very real threat of murder by oligarchs, and I consider myself lucky to have never been in a moral quandry over reporting someone who would just as soon kill me. But if I were in that situation, I would absolutely choose self-preservation, and I wouldn't fault anyone else for doing the same. We should applaud and appreciate heroes because it is a rare circumstance to be both willing and able to put your life on the line for others. I'm not willing, nor thankfully am I able.
Iirc, openai were already in the middle of lawsuits about it. He didn't actually whistleblow anything, just wrote about it while having Insider info, none of that info being new though.
It went viral enough so that any future employers could Google him and obviously bin his cv. It sucks but if you trash your old company publicly, it's harder to find a job after. He basically killed his career with that blog post, I don't think there was any foul play.
His death did coincide with several pending lawsuits targeting OpenAI.
That's a bit what I'm saying. Everything he talked about was well known. OpenAI admitted to it directly in January 2024
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-chatgpt-copyrighted-material-openai
Suchir's parents are intensifying their push for answers, expanding their advocacy into a full-time effort to challenge the official ruling of suicide.