The mother of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, is calling for an FBI investigation into his death. Poornima Ramarao came to X on Sunday to announce that Balaji's family has hired a private investigator, whose initial findings allegedly question the city's chief medical examiner's determination that Balaji died by suicide .
Balaji, who is just 26 years old, has worked at OpenAI for four years, where he played a key part in collecting data to be used to train ChatGPT. He became disillusioned when OpenAI changed from a non-profit research lab to a commercial enterprise, however, and he resigned in August before going public in a interview including New York Times allegations of widespread copyright infringement. The news outlet is currently in a heated legal battle with OpenAI that claims ChatGPT was trained on its articles without permission.
“Suchir's apartment was ransacked,” the post of Ramarao (which goes by the shorter “Rao” surname in X) reads. “There were signs of a struggle in the bathroom and it looks like he hit someone in the bathroom based on the blood stains.” The identity of the X account has yet to be verified, but it has shared photos of Balaji that do not appear to have been posted elsewhere online. It also linked to a GoFundMe account intended to raise funds for further investigation, which has raised more than $47,000.
Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and is currently embroiled in his own lawsuit against the AI giant, answered to Ramarao's post saying simply, “It doesn't look like suicide.”
Gizmodo Ramarao was contacted for comment but did not hear back. OpenAI defines a earlier statement condolences to the family.
Update on @suchirbalaji
We hired a private investigator and performed a second autopsy to determine the cause of death. A private autopsy did not confirm the cause of death that police said.
Suchir's apartment was ransacked, signs of a struggle in the bathroom and it looks like someone hurt him…
— Poornima Rao (@RaoPoornima) December 29, 2024
Balaji started working at OpenAI as an intern in 2018 and joined the company full-time in 2021. Business Insider interviewed Ramarao following his son's death, and wrote that Balaji was gifted from an early age and made significant contributions to ChatGPT's training methods and infrastructure during his time there. In 2022 he was tasked with scraping data from around the internet for use in training GPT-4, the model that would power the launch of ChatGPT later that year.
Considered OpenAI to have started Silicon Valley's generative AI race, Balaji has served as a high-profile whistleblower in the fight over whether AI companies have the right to openly use content from around the web in their products. It's a very divisive topic, with media companies calling it outright theft while tech industry insiders chalk it up to fair use. At stake are potentially tens of billions of dollars and the future of what some believe is the next major technological platform change. The large language models that power models like ChatGPT require vast amounts of training data, primarily written text, to write like a human and generate answers to any question thrown at them.
OpenAI and other companies in the space have not been transparent about their training sets, keeping the data themselves under lock and key. But their web crawlers have been found scraping websites across the internet, resulting in platforms like Reddit and X crashing, and many of the models rely on public databases of digital information including Wikipedia and Common Crawl, a database of more than 250 billion web pages collected since 2007. Balaji is not exactly a whistleblower per se, as it is commonly known. But the fact that he was an OpenAI insider gave more weight to his concerns.
Unsurprisingly, Balaji is likely to face heavy criticism and bullying online after going public with his concerns. Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley has seen how the pressure to succeed can cause significant stress and other mental health issues. That's not even including other risk factors such as legal issues from making a whistleblower complaint; lose a job and damage future career prospects; or social isolation from industry peers.
Is it possible that Balaji was targeted in his actions? It's possible, but conspiracies are hard to hide, and the blunt answer is often the right one. It's not that hard to see how everything Balaji is going through can lead to despair. Nor is he the first case of a tech whistleblower taking their own life over their moral convictions—Theranos' top scientist, Ian Gibbons, reportedly took his own life after facing massive pressure from founder and now-convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes for raising concerns about the effectiveness of the company's blood tests.
No wonder Balaji's parents went to the lengths they did, hoping to find answers and in disbelief that their son was gone. They might discover that something more sinister has happened. But there's no good reason to believe that's the case at this point. Hopefully, they will find the closure they are looking for.
