OpenAI and the problem of Suchir Balaji's Suicide

BigTech vs. the societal impact of their products. The loss of human agency accelerates.

Suchir Balaji in Hawaii in 2018. Photograph: Balaji Ramamurthy/AP

Hey Everyone,

While on my X-mas break I have been concerned about signals we are getting from the newscycle. The cases of Luigi Mangione and Suchir Balaji can tell us a lot about the future of tech and “broligarchy capitalism” as an authoritarian construct. Whether you are trying to get health insurance or find information, AI is going to be everywhere soon.

While American culture has been busy analyzing the various concerns of the loss of agency Luigi Mangione might have been feeling with his murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, I cannot help but feel the former OpenAI employee and Indian Suchir Balaji’s story has been a bit left behind.

If you are whistle blower from OpenAI, what legal hardships might you face do you imagine? A former OpenAI employee and whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his apartment in San Francisco, California. Balaji left OpenAI earlier this year and voiced concerns publicly that the company had allegedly violated U.S. copyright laws in building its popular ChatGPT chatbot.

He was questioning if “Fair Use” was a good policy concerning the huge copyright lawsuits OpenAI and others like it are facing. In both cases, Luigi and Suchir, young people are crying out about the social injustices they are witnessing - and we should be listening. Monopoly capitalism is becoming very toxic and OpenAI is following that pattern of conduct.

“The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” David Serrano Sewell, executive director of San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, but I frankly even wonder about that.

Clearly Suchir Balaji’s legal problems were mounting, as a whistle blower of one of the most ruthless AI startups. We know they are ruthless based on their exit NDAs and the investigative journalism around these practices. But enough to take his own life? What does it say about the legacy of Generative AI and copyright in 2024? A world where most of our data and public data has already been scrapped to train these AI models?

Is there any real consent heading to a more automated and AI-enabled world?

This wasn’t an activist, so why did he become a whistle-blowers?

Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He had been well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI’s strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products.

He was just 26, Balaji left OpenAI earlier this year and raised concerns publicly that the company had allegedly violated U.S. copyright law while developing its popular ChatGPT chatbot.

Microsoft’s “Fair Use” definition has been pushed on all of us. It’s impacted everything from oru culture, to our music to artists and their livelihoods. There’s been debate about its impact on the future of entertainment, movies, video gaming. Yet no real action has been taken, aside from a few lawsuits that aren’t likely to hold BigTech and their glorified research lab startups accountable. Sam Altman is not going to be held accountable for the damages his models might cause. This is a world where clearly BigTech has far too much control, lobbying influence, power and legal and public relations clout - a dangerously dystopian world.

His death comes three months after publicly accusing OpenAI of violating U.S. Copyright law while developing Chat GPT. How could that be? Does this sound like a research without a bright future? His parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they are still seeking answers, describing their son as a “happy, smart and brave young man” who loved to hike and recently returned from a trip with friends.

Curiously of course, multiple lawsuits against Open AI are expected to present information Balaji unearthed as key evidence. Balaji wasn’t just a start employee at this time at OpenAI, he was an expensive problem for OpenAI and their legal team after he left.

Profiting from Disrupting the Livelihood of Others

In October, The New York Times published a story about Balaji’s concerns. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji told the paper. He reportedly believed that ChatGPT and other chatbots like it would destroy the commercial viability of people and organizations who created the digital data and content now widely used to train AI systems.

As it turns out, others did also leave OpenAI in the months of 2024, many for the realization that OpenAI was not funding AI trust and saftey appropriately or taking AI ethics seriously in their rush to build profitable products and convert into a for profit entity under the leadership of Sam Altman and investor Microsoft.

Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the fledgling 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.

His death, which came on light only on 13 December, came weeks after he had made serious allegations against the AI company. If the U.S. controls Generative AI it controls the entire copyright and Fair Use narrative for its dominant products all over the world. It doesn’t matter what AI policy is in other regions or countries. BigTech has completely hijacked Generative AI startups and products heading into 2025. BigTech as a weaponization of U.S. exceptionalism against the rest of the world it increasingly appears.

It’s not just Luigi or Balaji who are concerned with the loss of human agency, ethics or social injustice this is leading to, it’s millions of citizens who don’t really have a voice. Even AI policy professionals within these BigTech companies obviously don’t have a real voice. At this point I’m convinced they act more like PR and Comms professionals and are often replaced, with entire teams being laid off on a fairly regular basis. You can check the history of OpenAI, Microsoft of Google for evidence of this yourself, which I have covered before.

OpenAI is currently involved in legal disputes with a number of publishers, authors and artists over alleged use of copyrighted material for AI training data. But what chance to they have of being resolved - even as the entire world doesn’t have much high quality training data left to protect! Generative AI automation browsers will be able to harvest even more personal high quality data from citizens - like OpenAI’s Operator, Google Mariner or Anthropic’s Computer Use that take screen shots of our devices at scale in order to complete tasks. Microsoft’s Recall product is fairly aggressive in terms of PC screenshots.

When you talk about the erosion of agency or privacy, you are really talking about the erosion of freewill in a more AI automated society. The Generative AI movement is BigTech turning millions of citizens and people against them. Because it’s a battle over human agency of the future. If the U.S. no longer believe in antitrust regulation or fair capitalism, it will lead to more acts of activism, or whatever you want to call them. This is a bigger societal and collective issue than just the profit incentives of BigTech companies or OpenAI’s own conduct with its former employees. The incentives of even a non-profit like OpenAI, are clearly not benefiting people or individuals.

“Suchir’s contributions to this project were essential, and it wouldn’t have succeeded without him,” said OpenAI co-founder John Schulman in a social media post memorializing Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what had made him such an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and ability to notice subtle bugs or logical errors.

“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He’d think through the details of things carefully and rigorously.”

Suchir Balaji was clearly at OpenAI long enough to be indoctrinated into its ideology and also to see the disillusionment at the end of the line. The grand deception that such a startup must pull off into order for ChatGPT to “go viral”. OpenAI is not a culture that’s known for its integrity or good business practices. The incentives in capitalism clearly no longer give leaders the right value alignment in order to build safe or trustworthy products.

On Building the Omniscient Machine of the Future

What can an American Indian kid from Cupertino teach us about the future?

Balaji later shifted to organizing the huge datasets of online writings and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large language model and a basis for the company’s famous chatbot. It was that work that eventually caused Balaji to question the technology he helped build, especially after newspapers, novelists and others began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.

Officers went to Balaji’s at 1:15 p.m. on Nov. 26 for a wellness check, SFPD confirmed.

He leaves behind a blog: When does generative AI qualify for fair use?

Should Venture Capitalists in Silicon Valley have the power to disrupt artists, writers and culture makers all around the world? Should the startups funded by Microsoft?

It’s clear in 2024 that the U.S. doesn’t really care about AI regulation, certainly not as much as Europe or even China and most other regions. Why would they when Generative AI is yet another means for them to push their cultural ideology on others? The problem is this is a culture that benefits Billionaires more than it empowers young people or real culture and those who work in culture, education and so forth. Gen AI certainly has the potential to disrupt the livelihood of tutors and teachers too one day.

This isn’t just about Fair Use or the loss of human agency but the sort of world we want to build for our future and the future of our children. Luigi Mangione’s feelings about Japan being the future of dystopia isn’t a riddle, it’s happening everywhere. Lower fertility, lower mental health for young people, housing affordability issues, more men in their peak worker years abandoning the workforce - it’s not an isolated trend. What Luigi or Balaji feel or felt, aren’t particular unique to them or fringe. It’s no longer a conspiracy theory to realize these outcomes are bad.

The Price of Cult Ethics and AGI Marketing

OpenAI’s success with ChatGPT comes with a price, a price of students using AI instead of acquiring the full spectrum of literacy, problem solving and creative thinking skills themselves, among many others things. OpenAI’s lack of real alignment with ethics, transparency, accountability and good leadership will have an impact on the entire Generative AI ecosystem. It will have an impact on an entire generation of young people and their livelihoods in the future.

In Balaji’s final post on X, he brought up the New York Times article that quoted him.

“I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I’m skeptical ‘fair use’ would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products,” Balaji wrote. Was he silenced or what would be the motive for committing suicide at such an important time in what he now believed in? It doesn’t make any sense.

When Balaji spoke to the Times about his decision to leave the company in August, he cautioned that “this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.” OpenAI has already let go most of the researchers who were interested in researching this problem in any serious manner. What does that say about Sam Altman and his Microsoft shareholders?

Balaji publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law with its ChatGPT app. Given OpenAI’s significant team of lawyers, lobbyists, PR professionals - might Balaji have been under duress? The timing of his suicide is not random.

He later told the Associated Press he would “try to testify” in the strongest copyright infringement cases and considered a lawsuit brought by the New York Times last year to be the “most serious”. Times lawyers named him in an 18 November court filing as someone who might have “unique and relevant documents” supporting allegations of OpenAI’s willful copyright infringement.

His records were also sought by lawyers in a separate case brought by book authors including the comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing, according to the Guardian and other reporting.

“It doesn’t feel right to be training on people’s data and then competing 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 are able to do that legally.”

OpenAI is a multi-billion dollar business - and just eight days before the former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji was found dead in a San Francisco apartment, the 26-year-old's name appeared in a lawsuit against his former employer that could have significant implications for the future of AI and the internet. Not just a coincidence.

How “devastated” do you suppose Sam Altman and his team of lawyers really were to hear of his passing? It was a blessing in disguise to their interests and motivations. This is the kind of internet story we are building, and I’m afraid the American internet is becoming too authoritarian and too centralized in just a few companies. Billionaires have far too much control and ChatGPT is just another NSA tool of Surveillance Capitalism no doubt. It’s not an Oracle.

US and Canadian news publishers, including the New York Times, and a group of best-selling writers, including John Grisham, have filed lawsuits claiming the company was illegally using news articles to train its software. There are multiple lawsuits that are not likely to do anything for the sort of data harvesting, theft and training practices that have already taken place.

On November 18, the Times' attorneys asked a judge to add Balaji as a "custodian" in the lawsuit, according to court documents. What did OpenAI’s or Microsoft’s lawyers do next do you suppose? The rest is history.

It’s clear the incentives of American capitalism have broken down while Generative AI has been used to boost ETF inflows and the U.S. stock market artificially to benefit the elites. OpenAI is at the crux of the problem and as they grow their monopoly hold on consumer B2C chatbots, namely ChatGPT destroying its competition (and the unethical lengths required to do this), there are bleak reminders of what is truly at stake.

OpenAI contends that its use of internet material is fair use, “supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedent.” What the conduct of OpenAI did was establish norms at Anthropic and elsewhere on what was required to quickly build the best large language models. Rule of law was the least of their concerns, and this is reflected in the short life of Suchir Balaji.

Whatever you want to call it, the Billionaire or AI Bro capitalism people like Sam Altman at OpenAI are conducting, is toxic. With unintended consequences in the future we cannot even begin to fully imagine in 2024.