OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

> Before others post about the definition of whistleblower or talk about assassination theories just pause to consider whether, if in his position, you would that want that to be written about you or a friend.

Yes, if I was a few months away from giving the court a statement and I "suicided" myself, I'd rather have people tribulate about how my death happened than expect to take the suicide account without much push.

Sure, if I killed myself in silence I want to go in silence. But it's not clear from the article how critical this guy is in the upcoming lawsuits

> Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company.

If I die in the midst of whistleblowing, I hereby give permission for everyone to not ignore that fact.

> Before others post about the definition of whistleblower or talk about assassination theories just pause to consider whether, if in his position, you would that want that to be written about you or a friend.

You damn well better be trying to figure out what happened if I end up a dead whistleblower.

>if in his position, you would that want that to be written about you or a friend.

If that was my public persona, I don't see why not. He could have kept quiet and chosen not to testify if he was afraid of this defining him in a way.

I will say it's a real shame that it did become his public legacy, because I'm sure he was a brilliant man who would have truly help change the world for the better with a few more decades on his belt.

All that said, assassination theories are just that (though "theory" is much too strong a word here in a formal sense. it's basically hearsay). There's no real link to tug on here so there's not much productivity taking that route.

It seems most are expressing sadness and condolences to the family and friends around what is clearly a great loss of both an outstanding talent and a uniquely principled and courageous person.

There will always be a few tacky remarks in any Internet forum but those have all found their way to the bottom.

RIP.

I considered writing something more focused on him, but the rampant speculation was only going to get worse if no one pointed out the very intentional misleading implications baked into the headline. I stand by what I wrote, but thank you for adding to it by drawing attention away from the entirely-speculative villains and to the very real person who has died.

As a reader, I prefer not to be misled by articles linked from the HN front page. So I do want to know whether someone is or is not a whistleblower. This has nothing to do with respect for the dead.

> Before others post about the definition of whistleblower or talk about assassination theories just pause to consider whether, if in his position, you would that want that to be written about you or a friend.

People are free to comment on media events. You too are free to assume the moral high ground by commenting on the same event, telling people what they should or should not do.

The issue is it has to be proven in court. This man was personally responsible for developing web scraping; stealing data from likely copyrighted sources. He would have had communications specifically addressing the legality of his responsibilities, which he was openly questioning his superiors about.

The article holds clues: "Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company."

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.

There's also the output side: Perhaps outputs of generative AI should be ineligible for copyright.

I just realized I stumbled on some of this guys writings when I was researching AI and copyright cases. I submitted this one to HN awhile back.

He seemed very insightful for someone that isn't a lawyer.

RIP.

> training on copyrighted data without a similar licensing agreement is also a type of market harm, because it deprives the copyright holder of a source of revenue

I would respond to this by

1. authors don't actually get revenue from royalties, instead it's all about add revenue which leads to enshittification. If they were to live on royalties they would die of hunger, artists, copywriters and musicians.

2. copyright is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies and don't really benefit the authors or the readers

3. actually the competition to new creative works is not AI, but old creative works that have been accumulating for 25 years on the web

I don't think restrictive copyright is what we need. Instead we have seen people migrate from passive consumption to interactivity, we now prefer games, social networks and search engines to TV, press and radio. Can't turn this trend back, it was created by the internet. We have now wikipedia, github, linux, open source, public domain, open scientific publications and non-restrictive environments for sharing and commenting.

If we were to take the idea of protecting copyrights to the extreme, it would mean we need to protect abstract ideas not just expression, because generative AI can easily route around that. But if we protected abstractions from reuse, it would be a disaster for creativity. I just think copyright is a dead man walking at this point.

The US is turning into Russia where anyone about to testify magically falls out a window

It should be taught in school that being a whistleblower requires safety preparation. Make it a woke thing or whatever, because it is something many don't give an afterthought about.

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Ha, that gives a pretty good picture how "open" Openai is. They want to own their employees, enslave them in a way. One might even think the cause of that whistleblower's death is contagious upon publishing.

Really ridiculous how afraid Openai is of criticism. Acting like a child that throws a tantrum, when something doesn't go its way, just that one needs to remind oneself, that somehow there are, with regard to age at least, adults behind this stuff.

Not anymore. In May 2024 OpenAI confirmed that it will not enforce those provisions:

* The company will not cancel any vested equity, regardless of whether employees sign separation agreements or non-disparagement agreements

* Former employees have been released from their non-disparagement obligations

* OpenAI sent messages to both former and current employees confirming that it "has not canceled, and will not cancel, any vested units"

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/24/openai_contract_staff...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-24/openai-re...

> It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

Can someone with legal expertise weigh in on how likely this would be to hold up in court?

I am amazed that such things are possible. Here on France this is so illegal that it is laughable.

I am saying "laughable" because there are small things companies try to enforce, and say sorry afterwards. But telling you that you are stuck with this for life is comedy grade.

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Further piling on potential stress for any whistleblower in a highly specialized field, once you're publicly critical of that field, you're basically unemployable there. And that's without any active retribution from the offending employer. Any retribution, such as blacklisting among peer HR departments would bring an even dimmer outlook.

Mental health challenges in the bay area tech industry are real for a wide variety of reasons. There's a bigger push in silicon valley for work life balance and mental health care than anywhere else I've been, but more people with serious issues there than anywhere else I've been as well.

Imposter syndrome is high among engineers of all levels of experience and ability. Engineering has it's own set of pressures. Then you add in all the other reasons people can feel stressed or pressured and all of the bay area specific reasons those things are amplified. It adds up.

You would be surprised how many brilliant and highly capable people have broken down. For anyone out there feeling like they are all alone - don't. Even if all the people around you seem happy and confident, I guarantee that a larger portion of them than you realize are struggling.

Well put. Almost all of the SF startups I worked for were run by sociopaths willing to break any rule I eventually learned. One is now being charged by the FTC for massive violations. I hated the immoral mindset of winning at the cost of everything from employee comfort to flagrantly illegal activities with customers.

I enjoy using Generative AI but have significant moral qualms with how they train their data. They flagrantly ignore copyright law for a significant amount of their data. The fact they do enter into licensing agreements with some publishers basically shows they know they are breaking the law.

> Normally the word "whistleblower" means someone who revealed previously-unknown facts

Not to be pedantic, but this is actually incorrect, both under federal and California law. Case law is actually very explicit on the point that the information does NOT need to be previously unknown to qualify for whistleblower protection.

However, disclosing information to the media is not typically protected.

> Normally the word "whistleblower" means someone who revealed previously-unknown facts about an organization.

A whistleblower could also be someone in the process of doing so, i.e. they have a claim about the organization, as well as a promise to give detailed facts and evidence later in a courtroom.

I think that's the more commonsense understanding of what whistleblowers are and what they do. Your remark hinges on a narrow definition.

No. Anytime someone potentially possesses information that is damning to a company and that person is killed… the low probability of such an even being a random coincidence is quite low. It is so low such that it is extremely reasonable to consider the potential for an actual assassination while not precluding that a coincidence is a possibility.

> 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.

That is an exceedingly charitable read of these lawsuits.

Everyone knows LLMs are copyright infringement machines. Their architecture has no distinction between facts and expressions. For an LLM to be capable of learning and repeating facts, it must also be able to learn and repeat expressions. That is copyright infringement in action. And because these systems are used to directly replace the market for human-authored works they were trained on, it is also copyright infringement in spirit. There is no defending against the claim of copyright infringement on technical details. (C.f. Google Books, which was ruled fair use because of it's strict delineation of facts about books and the expressions of their contents, and provides the former but not a substitute for the latter.)

The legal defense AI companies put up is entirely predicated on "Well you can't prove that we did a copyright infringement on these specific works of yours!".

Which is nonsense, getting LLMs to regurgitate training data is easy. As easy at it is for them to output facts. Or rather, it was. AI companies maintain this claim of "you can't prove it" by aggressively filtering out any instances of problematic content whenever a claim surfaces. If you didn't collect extensive data before going public, the AI company quickly adds your works to it's copyright filter and proclaims in court that their LLMs do not "copy".

A copyright filter that scans all output for verbatim reproductions of training data sounds like a reasonable compromise solution, but it isn't. LLMs are paraphrasing machines, any such copyright filter will simply not work because the token sequence 2nd-most-probable to a copyrighted expression is a simple paraphrase of that copyrighted expression. Now, consider: LLMs treat facts and expressions as the same. Filtering impedes the LLM's ability to use and process facts. Strict and extensive filtering will lobotomize the system.

This leaves AI companies in a sensitive legal position. They are not playing fair in the courts. They are outright lying in the media. The wrong employees being called to testify will be ruineous. "We built an extensive system to obstruct discovery, here's the exact list of copyright infringement we hid". Even just knowing which coworkers worked on what systems (and should be called to testify) is dangerous information.

Sure. The information was public. But OpenAI denies it and gaslights extensively. They act like it's still private information, and to the courts, it currently still is.

And to clarify: No I'm not saying murder or any other foul play was involved here. Murder isn't the way companies silence their dangerous whistleblowers anyway. You don't need to hire a hitman when you can simply run someone out of town and harass them to the point of suicide with none of the legal culpability. Did that happen here? Who knows, phone & chat logs will show. Friends and family will almost certainly have known and would speak up if that is the case.

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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.