This doesn't seem like suicide... Elon Musk spoke on Suchir Balaji's death.

US businessman Elon Musk has supported allegations of foul play in the death of 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji, who was found dead after accusing OpenAI of violating copyright laws. The OpenAI researcher's mother Purnima Rao raised concerns over the investigation conducted by the San Francisco Police Department, which ruled her son's death a suicide. She alleged that her son was murdered and demanded an FBI investigation.

In response to a post made by Purnima Rao on Twitter, Elon Musk said, 'It does not look like suicide.' In fact, Rao had said in her post that her son's death was a brutal murder which was declared a suicide by the authorities. She revealed that a private post-mortem report was different from the initial police report. She also noted that Balaji's apartment was robbed and marks of struggle in the bathroom suggest that he was killed.

Purnima Rao said, 'We hired a private investigator and got a second post-mortem done to ascertain the cause of death. The private post-mortem report does not confirm the cause of death stated by the police. Suchir's apartment was ransacked, there were signs of struggle in the bathroom and based on the blood stains, it seemed that someone had killed him in the bathroom. This is a brutal murder which has been declared a suicide by the authorities. Lobbying in the city of San Francisco cannot stop us from getting justice. We demand an FBI investigation.'

What did Suchir Balaji say?

Suchir Balaji was found dead in his apartment in San Francisco, months after he accused OpenAI of violating copyright laws while developing ChatGPT. The San Francisco Police Department ruled Balaji's death a suicide. Before his death on October 24, Suchir Balaji had expressed doubts about the fair use of generative artificial intelligence products, saying, 'I recently ran across a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I doubt fair use would be a reasonable defense for many generative AI products.'

He further added, “To give some context: I was at OpenAI for about 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of those years. I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc., but I got 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 unreliable defense for a lot of generative AI products, the basic reason being that they can make choices that compete with the data they've been trained on. I've written more detailed reasons why I believe this in my post. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but I still think it's important for non-lawyers to understand the law as well.”