PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Suchir Balaji

Suchir Balaji was an American artificial intelligence researcher who co-authored WebGPT and helped organize the internet data used to train GPT-4. He grew up in Cupertino, California, earned a computer-science degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked as an AI researcher at OpenAI from 2020 to 2024. He left the company in August 2024, and in October 2024 his essay argued that none of the four factors seemed to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data. Death came in San Francisco in November 2024, at age 26. As of April 2025, the San Francisco Police Department and the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner concluded that he had shot himself.

Works
4
Citations
1,687
h-index
4

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 17 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1998

    A childhood in Cupertino

    An American born in Florida in 1998, he grows up in Cupertino, California, where both of his parents work in technology.

  2. 2017–2021

    Contests, Quora, and Berkeley

    In 2017 he places seventh in a Kaggle Passenger Screening Algorithm Challenge sponsored by the US Transportation Security Administration and earns $100,000. A gap year after high school takes him to Quora as a software developer. He interns at Scale AI in 2019 and graduates from the University of California, Berkeley with a BA in computer science in 2021.

  3. November 2020–2024

    A researcher at OpenAI

    Work at OpenAI begins in November 2020. He is an artificial intelligence researcher at the company from 2020 to 2024, gathering and organizing internet data used to train GPT-4, a language model used by ChatGPT.

  4. 2021

    WebGPT and Codex

    In 2021 he co-authors WebGPT, a paper that fine-tunes GPT-3 to answer long-form questions by searching the web and collecting references. In 2021 he co-authors a paper that introduces Codex, a GPT model fine-tuned on publicly available code from GitHub, and a distinct production version of Codex powers GitHub Copilot.

  5. August 2024–October 2024

    Leaving over copyright

    He leaves OpenAI in August 2024, saying, "If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company." In October 2024 he publishes "When does generative AI qualify for fair use?" and writes that none of the four factors seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data.

  6. November 2024

    Death in San Francisco

    Police find him dead in his San Francisco apartment in November 2024, at age 26. The San Francisco medical examiner's office determines the death to be suicide, and police report no evidence of foul play.

  7. April 2025

    A ruling of suicide

    As of April 2025, the San Francisco Police Department and the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner conclude that he shot himself.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Suchir Balaji yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Suchir Balaji - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 16 October 2026.
  2. Family of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji demand FBI investigate death | San Francisco | The Guardian theguardian.com. Checked 16 October 2026.
  3. OpenAI whistleblower who raised legal concerns about ChatGPT's datasets has died | PBS News pbs.org. Checked 16 October 2026.
  4. [2112.09332] WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback arxiv.org. Checked 16 October 2026.
  5. [2107.03374] Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code arxiv.org. Checked 16 October 2026.
  6. When does generative AI qualify for fair use? suchir.net. Checked 16 October 2026.
  7. Suchir Balaji: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in apartment bbc.com. Checked 16 October 2026.