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OpenAI whistleblower's mother wants suicide death investigation reopened
This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Suchir Balaji, 26, who was found dead in his San Francisco home three months after accusing his former employer OpenAI of violating copyright laws in its development of ChatGPT, “felt that AI is a harm to humanity,” according to his mother.
Balaji’s death on November 26 was ruled a suicide, and Fox News Digital previously reported that the San Francisco Police Department found no evidence of foul play. But the 26-year-old’s mother is urging police to reopen their investigation, saying it “doesn’t look like a normal situation.”
Bereaved mother Poornima Ramarao told Business Insider that a private autopsy commissioned by Balaji’s family and completed in early December produced concerning results. Now, they are working with an attorney to urge the department to conduct a “proper investigation.”
“We want to leave the question open,” the bereaved mother, Poornima Ramarao, told the outlet.
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The AI researcher’s death came months after he parted ways with Open AI and raised concerns about the company breaking copyright law in an October interview with The New York Times. He was named in a copyright lawsuit waged against the company by the New York Times which alleged that Microsoft and OpenAI used millions of published articles to inform its technology and began competing with the outlet as a result.
On November 18, eight days before he was found dead, the outlet filed a letter in federal court that named Balaji as a person with “unique and relevant documents” that would be used in their litigation.
When he joined the company, his mother said, Balaji hoped that OpenAI’s software would be a benefit to society and was drawn to its open-source philosophy.
The OpenAI logo on a laptop computer arranged in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2023. Microsoft Corp. is in discussions to invest as much as $10 billion in OpenAI, the creator of viral artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT, according to people familiar with its plans. (Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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But his perspective shifted, she said, after ChatGPT launched and the company became more commercially focused.
Ramarao described the moment she saw medics approaching her son’s apartment and realized her son was dead.
“I was waiting to see medical help or nurses or someone coming out of the van,” she told the outlet. “But a stretcher came. A simple stretcher. I ran and asked the person. He said ‘we have a dead body in that apartment.’”
Balaji told the Times in August that he left OpenAI because he “no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.”
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave,” he told the outlet.
Balaji told the outlet that the repercussions of the technology would be far more “immediate” than he had initially feared.
A laptop screen is seen with the OpenAI ChatGPT website active in this photo illustration on 02 August, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images) (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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“I thought that AI was a thing that could be used to solve unsolvable problems, like curing diseases and stopping aging,” he said. “I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them.”
But instead, he said, chatbots were beginning to threaten the livelihoods of individuals that wrote the digital data used to train those systems.
“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,” he told the outlet.
He disagreed with assertions from Microsoft and OpenAI that their usage of preexisting online material fell under “fair use,” and therefore circumvented copyright laws.
“I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them,” Balaji wrote in October on the social media platform X. “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,” his post continued.
OpenAI and Microsoft are currently facing several other lawsuits from media outlets who accuse OpenAI of breaking copyright law.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the medical examiner and San Francisco Police.
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Mobile home residents in Bozeman, Montana, say they’re being forced to choose between paying rent and paying medical costs.Courtesy of Jered McCafferty
35-year-old Benjamin Moore has lived in Mountain Meadows Mobile Home Park, outside Bozeman, Montana, since he was 17. This month, for the first time, he’s withholding his rent.
On May 1, Moore received a rent bill for $947, up 11 percent from the month before, and the second hike in nine months—the product of the park’s sale to an undisclosed buyer.
Moore hung a sign on his trailer that says “RENT STRIKE.” He and his neighbors in Mountain Meadows and nearby King Arthur Park, organized with the citywide group Bozeman Tenants United, are collectively withholding over $50,000 a month from their landlord.
Historically, trailer parks have been a relatively affordable housing option—a third of trailer park residents in America live below the poverty line. But on average, their cost of living has risen 45 percent over the past decade. By unionizing, the Bozeman trailer park tenants believe they might be able to fight the most recent rent hike—especially given the state of their housing.
For years, tenants say, the maintenance hasn’t been attended to: tree limbs hang perilously over trailers, and water shutoffs are a regular occurrence. “I cannot recall a time in the past 20 years where we had three straight months of water and power working all day, every day,” Moore said.
Shauna Thompson, another resident, calls the water “atrocious…like a Milky Way, like you’re drinking skim milk. It’s very nasty and turned off all the time, without any notice.” And tenants allege that they’ve experienced retribution for maintenance requests, punitive eviction attempts, and unsafe conditions.
“It’s really hard on people here,” Moore said. Some residents are “already paying their entire Social Security check for rent. It’s a very poor neighborhood. We’ve got old folks. We’ve got young families. We’ve got working-class people who can’t afford anything else.”
For the past four decades, a group called Oakland Properties has owned both trailer parks. When they learned about the sale, tenants were scared that their parks would be bulldozed, or that their rent would be increased even further, forcing them to move.
The tenants attempted to buy the parks themselves, but were decisively outbid. The winning bidder demanded an NDA. The transaction should be finalized next month, park owner Gary Oakland said, but residents still don’t know who’s going to own the land they live on.
This month’s rent hike, Oakland acknowledged, was “part and parcel” of the sale. But for tenants, it’s a catastrophe. On top of the $947 lot rent—more than double the national average—many residents also pay off home loans on their trailers, as well as insurance and utilities costs.
Oakland calls claims of broken utilities “nonsense”: “If it was such a bad place to live, why would the homes be selling for such high dollars?” he said. The rent strike, Oakland points out, is “just a group of people not paying their rent.”
Some people are rationing their medication to make ends meet, Moore said. “There’s one person who canceled Life Alert. It’s either Life Alert or rent, and if you don’t pay rent, they evict you and throw you in the streets.”
Tenant organizers across the nation have found a foothold in recent years organizing against individual landlords, and Bozeman’s tenant union, situated in one of the fastest-growing communities in the state, is no exception. Tenant unions from Los Angeles to Kansas City to New York have organized to win rent freezes, maintenance, and security in their homes.
Mobile home parks—increasingly private-equity-owned and uniquely at-risk in the face of climate disasters—are organizing, too: a group of trailer park residents in Columbia, Missouri, unionized in February. In Montana, as Rebecca Burns recently wrote for In These Times, mobile homes were already once a site of tenant organizing: buoyed by the state’s miners unions, the first Bozeman-area mobile home tenants’ union won an agreement with their landlord in 1978.
Oakland says park residents “have been terrorized by the union,” and plans to evict the strikers. The strikers say they’ve retained a lawyer and will fight to stay in their homes.
“I wish none of this was happening,” Moore said. “Your utilities should work. Your place should be safe. You should be able to get in and out of it. These are the absolute basics, and they just haven’t kept them up. And if you call them on it, they threaten you.”
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