OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji was found dead in his apartment last year – with several people including Elon Musk crying. His mother claimed earlier this week that the late engineer had opposed the transformation of OpenAI into a “for-profit” company. The interview has sparked new debate and also sparked a reaction from the billionaire businessman on X.
“The reason he joined OpenAI was his belief that AI will help humanity. He was very impressed with OpenAI at first because they were non-profit. That’s when his concerns started to arise and he started to question himself,” said the whistleblower’s mother in an interview with Mario Nawfal on X.
Musk reshared the video on his social media handle – underscoring his point with several exclamation points. He had previously agreed with her that it “didn’t seem like a suicide”. The Tesla and SpaceX founder — once a co-founder of OpenAI — has been vocal in his criticism of recent decisions made by Sam Altman.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment last year – months after accusing OpenAI of violating copyright laws when developing ChatGPT. The San Francisco Police Department has ruled his death a suicide and has found no evidence of “foul play”.
Suchir Balaji had expressed skepticism about “fair use” of artificial intelligence generative products during an interaction on 24 October.
“I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I’m skeptical that ‘fair use’ would be a reasonable defense for many generative AI products,” he had said a month before his death.
He added, “To give some context: I was at OpenAI for almost 4 years and worked at ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them. I didn’t initially know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but got curious after seen all the lawsuits against GenAI companies.”
As I tried to understand the problem better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems a rather unlikely defense for many generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they are trained on. I’ve written up the more detailed reasons why I believe this in my post. Obviously, I’m not a lawyer, but I still feel it’s important for even non-lawyers to understand the law — both the letter of it, and also why it’s actually there in the first place,” he wrote. (ANI). )
(With input from agencies)
