PANews reported on December 14 that according to Decrypt, Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former OpenAI employee, publicly accused the company of unethical use of data to train its artificial intelligence platform, and was later found dead in his San Francisco apartment .
Suchir Balaji worked as a researcher on the technical staff of OpenAI from November 2020 to August 2024. He said in an interview with The New York Times that he helped OpenAI train ChatGPT without permission using large amounts of data collected from the internet until its public release in November 2022. Among other allegations, The New York Times reported that the company created its own transcription software and ran it on YouTube to collect data.
According to authorities, police and medical personnel were called to Balaji's home on November 26 to check on his health and later found him dead in his apartment. "The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the deceased as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco," the medical examiner's office said in a statement. "The cause of death has been determined to be suicide."
