San Francisco’s medical examiner has ruled that OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji died by suicide, amid speculation fueled by his own family that he was murdered. An autopsy report has backed up initial police findings which found “no evidence of foul play” while revealing several other disturbing details.
Balaji quit OpenAI last year after becoming disenfranchised with the company’s data training practices. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji told The New York Times. Balaji had come to the opinion that scraping images, text, and videos from the open web and feeding it to AI models was not a “sustainable model for the internet ecosystem.”
After his death, rumors began to swirl around the circumstances. His own parents questioned the official story saying “there was no suicide note left” and “there was nobody else at the scene but that doesn’t mean they can just come to a conclusion.”
The family released gruesome photos of blood splattered around his apartment which they say proves Balaji’s death was a cold-blooded murder. However, the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office returned a suicide verdict while highlighting new findings.
The report reveals that Balaji had alcohol and amphetamine in his system when he died and had been searching on his computer for information about brain anatomy. It also highlighted that there was only one entrance into Balaji’s apartment — the front door — and there was no sign of “forced entry to the unit or disturbance within the unit.”
Security camera footage and key fob records also confirmed that no one else entered the apartment during the time window in which he died.
“These facts, taken together, support that Mr Balaji was alone at the time of the incident,” writes San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott in a joint letter with the Medical Examiner’s office. “The SFPD found no evidence or information to establish that Mr Balaji died of means other than a suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”
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.
Source link
