Condolences to the family. It sounds like he was a very thoughtful and principled person.
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OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
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Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#22I wonder who called to ask about his well-being.
The Boeing guy killed himself, this guy apparently killed himself. The pattern of David vs Goliath, where David kills himself, is almost becoming a pattern.
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#23Anyone who's a whistleblower should compile key docs and put it in a "dead man's switch" service that releases your testimony/docs to multiple news agencies in the event of your untimely demise. The company you're whistle blowing against and their major shareholders should know this exists. Also, regularly post public video attesting to you current mental state.
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Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#24Interesting that the NYT article about him states that OpenAI started developing GPT-4 before the ChatGPT release. They sure were convinced by the early GPT-2/3 results.
>In early 2022, Mr. Balaji began gathering digital data for a new project called GPT-4
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/openai-copyrig...
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#25Normally the word "whistleblower" means someone who revealed previously-unknown facts about an organization. In this case he's a former employee who had an interview where he criticized OpenAI, but the facts that he was in possession of were not only widely known at the time but were the subject of an ongoing lawsuit that had launched months prior. As much as I want to give this a charitable reading, the only explana…
You assume he revealed everything he knew, he was most likely under NDA, the ongoing lawsuit cited him as a source. Which presumably he didn't yet testify for and now he never will be able to. His (most likely ruled suicide inb4) death should also give pause to the other 11 on that list:
> He was among at least 12 people — many of them past or present OpenAI employees — the newspaper had named in court filings as having material helpful to their case, ahead of depositions.
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#26Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#27Anyone who's a whistleblower should compile key docs and put it in a "dead man's switch" service that releases your testimony/docs to multiple news agencies in the event of your untimely demise. The company you're whistle blowing against and their major shareholders should know this exists. Also, regularly post public video attesting to you current mental state.
But then what do you have to whistleblow?
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
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Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#29http://suchir.net/fair_use.html When does generative AI qualify for fair use? by Suchir Balaji
It's also worth reading his initial tweet: https://x.com/suchirbalaji/status/1849192575758139733
> I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I'm skeptical "fair use" would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post (https://suchir.net/fair_use.html) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I believe this.
> To give some context: I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them. I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on. I've written up the more detailed reasons for why I believe this in my post. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but I still feel like it's important for even non-lawyers to understand the law -- both the letter of it, and also why it's actually there in the first place.
> That being said, I don't want this to read as a critique of ChatGPT or OpenAI per se, because fair use and generative AI is a much broader issue than any one product or company. I highly encourage ML researchers to learn more about copyright -- it's a really important topic, and precedent that's often cited like Google Books isn't actually as supportive as it might seem.
> Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to chat about fair use, ML, or copyright -- I think it's a very interesting intersection. My email's on my personal website.
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#30Normally the word "whistleblower" means someone who revealed previously-unknown facts about an organization. In this case he's a former employee who had an interview where he criticized OpenAI, but the facts that he was in possession of were not only widely known at the time but were the subject of an ongoing lawsuit that had launched months prior. As much as I want to give this a charitable reading, the only explana…
You assume he revealed everything he knew, he was most likely under NDA, the ongoing lawsuit cited him as a source. Which presumably he didn't yet testify for and now he never will be able to. His (most likely ruled suicide inb4) death should also give pause to the other 11 on that list: > He was among at least 12 people — many of them past or present OpenAI employees — the newspaper had named in court filings as hav…
Being one of 12+ witnesses in a lawsuit where the facts are hardly in dispute is not the same as being a whistleblower. The key questions in this lawsuit are not and never were going to come down to insider information—OpenAI does not dispute that they trained on copyrighted material, they dispute that it was illegal for them to do so.