Mother of OpenAI whistleblower alleges possible murder plot, calls for FBI investigation

The mother of OpenAI whistleblower Sushir Balaji, who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, is calling for an FBI investigation into his death. Poornima Ramarao took to X on Sunday to announce that Balaji’s family has hired a private investigator, whose preliminary findings allegedly cast doubt on the city’s chief medical examiner’s determination that Balaji died by suicide.

Balaji, who was just 26 years old, worked at OpenAI for four years, where he had a key role in collecting data that would be used to train ChatGPT. He was disappointed when OpenAI transitioned from a nonprofit research lab to a commercial company, and resigned in August before it went public in interview with New York Times Claiming mass copyright infringement. The news outlet is currently locked in a heated legal battle with OpenAI, which claims ChatGPT was trained on its articles without permission.

“Sucher’s apartment has been ransacked.” mail Read by Ramarao (who uses the shorter “Rao” surname on X). “Sign of a struggle in the bathroom and it looks like someone hit him in the bathroom because of the blood stains.” The identity of X’s account has not been verified, but he shared photos of Balaji that do not appear to be posted anywhere else online. It has also been linked to a GoFundMe account aimed at raising money for further investigation, which has raised more than $47,000.

Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and is currently embroiled in his lawsuit against the AI ​​giant, He replied To Ramarao’s post simply saying: “This does not look like a suicide.”

Gizmodo I contacted Ramarao for comment but we did not hear back. OpenAI noted a Previous statement Expressing his condolences to the family.

The update is running @suchirbalaji

We hired a private investigator and performed another autopsy to shed light on the cause of death. A private autopsy does not confirm the cause of death given by police.

Sucher’s apartment was ransacked, a sign of a struggle in the bathroom and it appears that someone beat 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 He was interviewed Ramarao after her son’s death, wrote that Balaji was gifted from a young age and made significant contributions to ChatGPT’s training methods and infrastructure during his time there. In 2022, he was tasked with collecting data from across the Internet for use in training GPT-4, the model that will support the launch of ChatGPT at the end of that year.

Given that OpenAI launched the generative AI race in Silicon Valley, Balaji has served as a high-profile whistleblower in the battle over whether AI companies have the right to openly use content across the web in their products. It’s a highly contentious topic, with media companies claiming outright theft while tech industry insiders attribute it to fair use. Tens of billions of dollars are likely at stake, and the future of what some believe is the next major shift in technology. The large language models that power models like ChatGPT require massive amounts of training data, especially written text, in order to write like a human and provide answers to any question they are asked.

It’s no surprise, then, that Balaji likely faced severe criticism and online bullying after going public with his concerns. Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley has seen how the pressure to succeed can cause major stress and other mental health issues. This doesn’t even include other risk factors such as legal issues resulting from filing a whistleblower complaint; loss of employment and harm to future employment prospects; Or social isolation from industry peers.

Is it possible that Balaji was targeted for his actions? Maybe, but conspiracies are hard to keep secret, and the boring answer is often the right one. It’s not hard to see how everything Balaji was going through could have led to despair. This wouldn’t be the first case of tech whistleblowers taking their lives over their ethical beliefs either, as Theranos’ principal scientist, Ian Gibbons, is said to have He took his own life After facing enormous pressure from founder and now convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes for raising concerns about the validity of the company’s blood tests.

It is not surprising that Balaji’s parents go to extremes, hoping to find answers and in a state of disbelief that they have lost their son. Maybe they’ll discover that something more nefarious has happened. But there is no strong reason to believe that is the case at this point. Hopefully they can find the closure they’re looking for.