Parents of Dead OpenAI Whistleblower Refuse to Believe It Was Suicide
The parents of Suchir Balaji — a former OpenAI employee turned whistleblower — have said they don’t believe their son committed suicide.
Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26. Police and the office of the chief medical examiner declared his death a suicide but Balaji’s parents have disputed that verdict.
“There was no suicide note left,” Balaji’s mother Poornima Ramarao tells ABC7. “There was nobody else at the scene but that doesn’t mean they can just come to a conclusion.”
Ramarao goes on to say she has “seen the blood shots in the bathroom” and “signs of a fight in the bathroom”.
Whistleblower Death
Balaji was a former OpenAI researcher who blew the whistle on the company’s data scraping practices after he felt strongly that the Sam Altman-led company was violating copyright law.
Part of his job was to gather enormous amounts of data for OpenAI’s GPT-4 multimodal AI. At the time, he treated it as a research project and didn’t think that the product he was working on would ultimately turn out to be a chatbot with an integrated AI image generator.
But when the research project turned into an actual product, Balaji believed that OpenAI was threatening the very entities that it had taken the data from to build its AI tools — including individuals, businesses, and internet services.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji told The New York Times in October.
Balaji was expected to play a key part in upcoming lawsuits against OpenAI. The company is facing multiple suits including one brought by The New York Times which filed a letter on November 18 to a federal court naming Balaji as a person who had “unique and relevant documents” that would support its case against OpenAI.
Parents Want Thorough Investigation
Balaji’s parents are demanding an FBI investigation into his death. Ramarao says it is because they don’t believe the San Francisco police department has the resources to conduct a thorough investigation into a complex case that includes issues such as whistleblower protection and cybersecurity.
The whistleblower’s father Balaji Ramamurthy was the last person to speak with him on November 22 just after his son had returned from a trip to Los Angeles which was part of his birthday celebrations.
“He was in L.A. and having a good time,” Ramamurthy says of his 15-minute call with his son shortly after he returned from the trip. “He sent us all the pictures. He was in a good mood.”
San Francisco police say the investigation remains open and active at this time.
If you are in crisis, call the toll-free National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The service is available to anyone. All calls are confidential.
