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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.
The lawsuit — filed by The New York Times last December — accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using "millions" of articles published by the newspaper without permission to train the AI startup's popular ChatGPT model. The companies have denied that they violated copyright law.
On November 18, the Times' attorneys asked a judge to add Balaji as a "custodian" in the lawsuit, according to court documents viewed by Business Insider. The attorneys' letter described Balaji as someone with "unique and relevant documents" that could support their copyright infringement case against OpenAI and Microsoft.
Other custodians proposed by the Times include former OpenAI employees such as cofounder Ilya Sutskever. Sutskever's potential contribution to the lawsuit is redacted in the court documents.
The Times' legal case is one of several copyright lawsuits filed against the AI startup after ChatGPT was released in 2022.
If the courts were to side with the Times or other news outlets and authors who have filed a lawsuit, the result could be costly for AI companies and limit the already finite data used to train models.
The Times' lawsuit doesn't demand an exact monetary figure but says OpenAI and Microsoft are responsible for "billions of dollars" in damages.
Spokespeople for OpenAI, Microsoft, and The New York Times did not respond to requests for comment.
Balaji joined OpenAI in 2020 and worked on training the ChatGPT and GPT-4 models, court documents and reporting from The New York Times show. The researcher, who said OpenAI's work violated copyright law, left the company in August "because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit," the Times reported.
On October 23, he published an essay on his personal website raising questions about whether OpenAI's use of copyrighted data could be considered fair use.
"While generative models rarely produce outputs that are substantially similar to any of their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of copyrighted data," Balaji wrote. "If these copies are unauthorized, this could potentially be considered copyright infringement, depending on whether or not the specific use of the model qualifies as 'fair use.' Because fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis, no broad statement can be made about when generative AI qualifies for fair use."
That same day, the Times published a profile of the former OpenAI researcher.
"If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company," he told the Times.
On November 26, eight days after Balaji's name appeared in the Times' attorney's letter, officers from the San Francisco Police Department responded to a welfare check at a Lower Haight-area apartment around 1:15 p.m.
"Officers and medics arrived on scene and located a deceased adult male from what appeared to be a suicide," an SFPD spokesperson told BI. "No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation."
The office of the city's chief medical examiner later identified the deceased male as Balaji.
"The manner of death has been determined to be suicide," David Serrano Sewell, executive director of the city's office of the chief medical examiner, told BI. He did not provide further comment.
"We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones during this difficult time," an OpenAI spokesperson told BI when reached for comment on Friday.
