"He would not harm himself." The parents of 26-year-old OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, who was found dead in his home in San Francisco a month after he went public accusing the company of breaking laws to train ChatGPT, are intensifying their efforts to challenge the official ruling of suicide.
  • daniyeg [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    13·
    6 days ago

    while i love nothing more than a conspiracy implicating the worst people we know, unfortunately it looks like the parents are just in denial. his whistleblowing didn’t really reveal much and the accusation was infringing copyright, which is not even a crime. they were getting sued for this the discovery process was far more damning. this keeps popping up and is literally worse PR than original new york times article.

    • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      5 days ago

      This may sound kinda insane but a lot of highly accomplished software engineers commit suicide because their career didn’t go as well as planned. Many of them spent their entire lives striving for this specific goal and their entire self worth and identity is wrapped up in the social status of their career

      A few people jump off the buildings of places like Meta, Google, Microsoft every year during the work day, and sometimes they make it out to the news but oftentimes it’s just swept under the rug. And every time they’re always from some team that has a terrible work culture. Many times these coders would prefer to commit suicide than quit their jobs or risk the shame of being fired for underperformance and lose their purpose in life + have their self worth destroyed

      In this case it’s possible he couldn’t come to terms with the consequences of whistleblowing on OpenAI and losing his career