Leed (リド)

The Mercury News

OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

A former OpenAI researcher who raised concerns about the company is dead at 26.

"Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program that has become a moneymaking sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world.

Its public release in late 2022 spurred a torrent of lawsuits against OpenAI from authors, computer programmers and journalists, who say the company illegally stole their copyrighted material to train its program and elevate its value past $150 billion.

The Mercury News and seven sister news outlets are among several newspapers, including the New York Times, to sue OpenAI in the past year.

In an interview with the New York Times published Oct. 23, Balaji argued OpenAI was harming businesses and entrepreneurs whose data were used to train ChatGPT.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told the outlet, adding that “this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”

Balaji grew up in Cupertino before attending UC Berkeley to study computer science. It was then he became a believer in the potential benefits that artificial intelligence could offer society, including its ability to cure diseases and stop aging, the Times reported. “I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them,” he told the newspaper.

But his outlook began to sour in 2022, two years after joining OpenAI as a researcher. He grew particularly concerned about his assignment of gathering data from the internet for the company’s GPT-4 program, which analyzed text from nearly the entire internet to train its artificial intelligence program, the news outlet reported.

The practice, he told the Times, ran afoul of the country’s “fair use” laws governing how people can use previously published work. In late October, he posted an analysis on his personal website arguing that point.

No known factors “seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data,” Balaji wrote. “That being said, none of the arguments here are fundamentally specific to ChatGPT either, and similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products in a wide variety of domains.”

Reached by this news agency, Balaji’s mother requested privacy while grieving the death of her son.

In a Nov. 18 letter filed in federal court, attorneys for The New York Times named Balaji as someone who had “unique and relevant documents” that would support their case against OpenAI. 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."

another request from twitter where king gave eda this shirt because he’s Right

Post-9/11 kids nowadays

Long time no see! I didn’t forget about this account, I was just experiencing major burn out and still unfortunately am

This is a commission for my friend @griffinblade over on Twitter and also a collab with @muneaj​ cause they drew the background I was struggling with ^^; It took me nearly a year to finish this due to my burn out but it’s finally here, thank you again Mune for helping me out, without you this wouldn’t be done at all ilysm bestie mwah It’s not winter time yet but I’m impatient to post it here, I’ll probably reblog it once the winter arrives Note that I am signing it as kyuubicore cause that’s my main username

Bonus Penny with a birb

I noticed some parallels, and decided to spend hours and way more effort than necessary turning them into a drawing! Because of course I did

Some art as of recent :`]

Gift art for a fren (@/turrkoise)

Custom dragon design for (@/chitsune)

They let me go wild full freedom woosh!

Im so happy with the outcome of the design ihihfhjh

And little thank you doodles for a peep that yoined one of my adopts :D

  🖤| Florida Keys Aquarium Encounters

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