[HN Gopher] OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apa...
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OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
Author : mmorearty
Score : 127 points
Date : 2024-12-13 21:56 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mercurynews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mercurynews.com)
| alsetmusic wrote:
| https://archive.is/xBuPg
| cryptozeus wrote:
| may he rip!
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I'm confused by the term "whistleblower" here. Was anything
| actual released that wasn't publicly known?
|
| It seems like he just disagreed with whether it was "fair use" or
| not, and it was notable because he was at the company. But the
| facts were always known, OpenAI was training on public
| copyrighted text data. You could call him an objector, or
| internal critic or something.
| stonogo wrote:
| The article holds clues: "Information he held was expected to
| play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based
| company."
| abeppu wrote:
| and later:
|
| >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.
|
| Yes it's true it's been public knowledge _that_ OpenAI has
| trained on copyrighted data, but details about what was
| included in training data (albeit dated ...), as well as
| internal metrics (e.g. do they know how often their models
| regurgitate paragraphs from a training document?) would be
| important.
| neilv wrote:
| Condolences to the family. It sounds like he was a very
| thoughtful and principled person.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > he was a very thoughtful
|
| Not that thoughtful. Copyright law is mostly harmful.
| Apparently he couldn't realize this simple conclusion.
| henry700 wrote:
| Found the hitman
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| http://suchir.net/fair_use.html
|
| When does generative AI qualify for fair use? by Suchir Balaji
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's hard to say anything because we don't know why he died, but
| I wonder if his death could have been prevented if he had not
| been exposed to this sort of propaganda that AI will help
| society. Then he wouldn't have worked at OpenAI and would have
| gone to do something more worthwhile with his life.
| abeppu wrote:
| So, not at all the point of the article, but ... who does Mercury
| News think is benefited the embedded map at the bottom of the
| article with a point just labeled "San Francisco, CA", centered
| at Market & Van Ness? It's not where the guy lived. If you're a
| non-local reader confused about where SF is, the map is far too
| zoomed in to show you.
| lolinder wrote:
| Normally the word "whistleblower" means someone who revealed
| previously-unknown facts about an organization. In this case he's
| a former employee who had an interview where he criticized
| OpenAI, 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.
|
| As much as I want to give this a charitable reading, the only
| explanation I can think of for using the word whistleblower here
| is to imply that there's something shady about the death.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| Being one of 12+ witnesses in a lawsuit where the facts are
| hardly in dispute is not the same as being a whistleblower.
| The key questions in this lawsuit are not and never were
| going to come down to insider information--OpenAI does not
| dispute that they trained on copyrighted material, they
| dispute that it was illegal for them to do so.
| DevX101 wrote:
| Anyone who's a whistleblower should compile key docs and put it
| in a "dead man's switch" service that releases your
| testimony/docs to multiple news agencies in the event of your
| untimely demise. The company you're whistle blowing against and
| their major shareholders should know this exists. Also, regularly
| post public video attesting to you current mental state.
| eastbound wrote:
| But then what do you have to whistleblow?
| cced wrote:
| Weren't theres couple of dead Boeing whistleblowers in recent
| times relating to poor AA/design?
| dgfitz wrote:
| I wonder who called to ask about his well-being.
|
| The Boeing guy killed himself, this guy apparently killed
| himself. The pattern of David vs Goliath, where David kills
| himself, is almost becoming a pattern.
| dtquad wrote:
| Interesting that the NYT article about him states that OpenAI
| started developing GPT-4 before the ChatGPT release. They sure
| were convinced by the early GPT-2/3 results.
|
| >In early 2022, Mr. Balaji began gathering digital data for a new
| project called GPT-4
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/openai-copyrig...
| minimaxir wrote:
| ChatGPT was a research project that went megaviral, it wasn't
| intended to be as big as it was.
|
| Training a massive LLM on the scale of GPT-4 requires a lot of
| lead time, so the timeframe makes sense.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| odd...OpenAI partnered with the military only a week ago
|
| now a whistleblower is found dead ? not sure what to make of it,
| he had no signs of depression, was seen quite happy and through
| his private circles and according to friends he was not suicidal
| but 'worried'
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/04/1107897/openais-...
| leobg wrote:
| I wonder if he received threats from Altman after the NYT piece
| came out.
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