New Delhi, India

Suchir Balaji, the former OpenAI engineer and whistle-blower who was found dead recently, believed the company's practices violated copyright laws, revealed his parents. Balaji was one of the people behind OpenAI's ChatGPT and even helped train the company's artificial intelligence systems.

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According to an AP report, the engineer was being considered as a witness against OpenAI.

Also read | Who was Suchir Balaji, whistleblower found dead after accusing OpenAI of copyright violation?

Suchir Balaji in court

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OpenAI founder John Schulman in a social media post memorialising Balaji described the Indian-origin engineer as someone whose "contributions to this project were essential," and said that ChatGPT "wouldn't have succeeded without him". So why did he resign?

As per reports, Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years and was a well-regarded member of the team. He played an important role in the development of some of the company's products. 

Later, he shifted to organising huge datasets of online writing to train OpenAI's fourth-generation language model, the GPT-4. While engaged in this work, he began to question the technology, especially after authors, newspapers and content creators started suing the company for copyright infringement.

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The engineer first raised the concern with the New York Times and reported the publication in October. Later, he told the Associated Press that he would "try to testify" in copyright infringement cases against the company.

"It doesn't feel right to be training on people's data and then competing with them in the marketplace," Suchir Balaji told AP in late October. 

"I don't think you should be able to do that. I don't think you are able to do that legally," he stressed.

He also published a personal blog post expressing his opinions on the topic. However, he had not been deposed, and it is unclear to what extent his revelations will be admitted as evidence in any legal cases after his death. 

(With inputs from agencies)