Suchir Balaji's mom talks about his life, death, and disillusionment with OpenAI: 'He felt AI is a harm to humanity'

• Former OpenAI employee Suchir Balaji alleged the startup violates copyright laws.
• His death in November reignited a debate about how top AI companies affect humanity.
• In an interview with BI, Balaji's mom shared his initial hopes for AI, and why they were dashed.

In October, Suchir Balaji made waves when he spoke against OpenAI.

In an interview with The New York Times, he discussed how powerhouse AI companies might be breaking copyright laws.

OpenAI's models are trained on information from the internet. Balaji helped collect and organize that data, but he grew to feel the practice was unfair. He resigned in August. And in November, he was named by NYT lawyers as someone who might have "unique and relevant documents" for their copyright-infringement case against OpenAI.

"If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave," he told the Times.

On November 26, the young engineer was found dead in his apartment. The tragedy struck a chord, stoking conspiracy theories, grief, and debate. What do we lose when AI models gain?

In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, Balaji's mother, Poornima Ramarao, offered clues.

Balaji joined OpenAI because of AI's potential to do good, she said. Early on, he loved that the models were open-source, meaning freely available for others to use and study. As the company became more financially driven and ChatGPT launched, those hopes faded. Balaji went from believing in the mission to fearing its consequences for publishers and society as a whole, she told BI.

"He felt AI is a harm to humanity," Ramarao said.

An OpenAI spokesperson shared that Balaji was a valued member of the team, and that his passing deeply affected those who worked closely with him.

"We were devastated to learn of this tragic news and have been in touch with Suchir's family to offer our full support during this difficult time," the spokesperson wrote in a statement. "Our priority is to continue to do everything we can to assist them."

"We first became aware of his concerns when The New York Times published his comments and we have no record of any further interaction with him," OpenAI's spokesperson added. "We respect his, and others', right to share views freely. Our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones, and we extend our deepest condolences to all who are mourning his loss."

Recruited by OpenAI

Growing up, Balaji's dad thought he was "more than average," Ramarao said. But she thought her son was a prodigy. By two years old, he could form complex sentences, she recalled.

"As a toddler, as a little 5-year-old, he never made mistakes. He was perfect," Ramarao said.

At age 11, he started learning to code using Scratch, a programming language geared toward kids. Soon, he was asking his mom, who's a software engineer, questions that went over her head. At 13, he built his own computer. At 14, he wrote a science paper about chip design.

"Dad would say, don't focus too much. Don't push him too much," Ramarao said.

They moved school districts to find him more challenges. His senior year, he was the US champion in a national programming contest for high-schoolers, leading to him getting recruited, at 17 years old, by Quora, the popular online knowledge-sharing forum. His mom was against it, so he fibbed to her about applying. But he had to fess up by the first day on the job because he couldn't drive yet.

"I had to give him a ride to his office in Mountain View," Ramarao said.

She was worried about how he'd handle "so many adults," but he made friends to play poker with and enjoyed Quora's abundant cafeteria.

She viewed it as a lesson in learning to trust her Balaji.

"Then I understood, okay, my son is really an advanced person. I cannot be a hindrance to him," Ramarao said.

After working for about a year, he went to UC Berkeley, and soon won $100,000 in a TSA-sponsored challenge to improve their passenger-screening algorithms.

It was all enough to be recruited by OpenAI. He interned with the company in 2018, per his LinkedIn, then joined full-time in 2021 after graduating.

An early standout

Over his nearly four-year tenure at OpenAI, Balaji became a standout, eventually making significant contributions to ChatGPT's training methods and infrastructure, John Schulman, an OpenAI cofounder, wrote in a social media post about Balaji.

"He'd think through the details of things carefully and rigorously. And he also had a slight contrarian streak that made him allergic to 'groupthink' and eager to find where the consensus was wrong," Schulman said in the post. Schulman didn't reply to BI's requests for comment.

Balaji had joined the company at a critical juncture, though.

OpenAI started off as a non-profit in 2015 with the explicit mission of ensuring that AI benefited all of humanity. As the startup moved away from its open-source and non-profit roots, Balaji became more concerned, Ramarao said.

When it launched ChatGPT publicly in November 2022, he reconsidered the copyright implications, she said.

Earlier that year, a big part of Balaji's role was gathering digital data — from all corners of the English-speaking internet — for GPT-4, a model that would soon power ChatGPT, per the Times interview. Balaji thought of this like a research project.

Using other people's data for research was one thing, he wrote in a later essay. Using it to make a product that could take away from those creators' revenue or traffic was another.

OpenAI didn't comment on Balaji's concerns to Business Insider. In court, it has argued that the legal doctrine of "fair use" protects how its models ingest publicly-available internet content.

"Too naive and too innocent"

By late 2023 and early 2024, Balaji's enthusiasm for OpenAI had fizzled out entirely, and he began to criticize CEO Sam Altman in conversations with friends and family, Ramarao said.

He used to tell his mom when he was working on "something cool," but more and more, he had nothing to say about his job, she told BI.

When he resigned in August, Ramarao didn't press the issue.

Come October, when she saw his bombshell interview with the Times, she unleashed a torrent of anxiety at Balaji. In shining a spotlight on what he thought was corporate wrongdoing, he was taking it all on his shoulders, she said.

"I literally blasted him," she said of their conversation. "'You should not go alone. Why did you give your picture? Why did you give your name? Why don't you stay anonymous? What's the need for you to give your picture?'"

"You have to go as a group. You have to go together with other people who are like-minded. Then he said, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm connecting with like-minded people. I'm building a team,'" she continued. "I think he was too naive and too innocent to understand this dirty corporate world."

Balaji's parents are calling for an investigation

When Balaji left OpenAI in August, he took a break.

"He said, 'I'm not taking up another job. Don't ask me,'" Ramarao said.

From Balaji's parents' vantage point, everything seemed fine with the young coder. He was financially stable, with enough OpenAI stock to buy a house one day, she said. He had plans to build a machine learning non-profit in the medical field.

"He wanted to do something for society," his mom said.

On November 21, a Thursday, Balaji celebrated his 26th birthday with friends while on vacation. The next day, he let his mom know when his flight home took off, and spoke with his dad on the phone before dinner. His dad wished him a happy birthday and said he was sending a gift.

According to Ramarao, the medical examiner said that Balaji died that evening, or possibly the next morning.

"He was upbeat and happy," she said. "What can go wrong within a few hours that his life is lost?"

On Saturday and Sunday, Ramarao didn't hear from her son. She thought that maybe he'd lost his phone or gone for a hike. But on Monday, she went and knocked on his door. He didn't answer. She thought about filing a missing person complaint. But, knowing he'd have to go in-person to remove it, she hesitated. "He'll get mad at me," she said of her thinking at the time.

The next morning, she called the San Francisco police. They found his body just after 1 p.m. PST, according to a spokesperson for the department. But Ramarao wasn't told or allowed inside, she said. As officers trickled in, she pleaded with them to check if his laptop and toothbrush were missing, she told BI; that way she'd know if he'd traveled.

"They didn't give the news to me," Ramaro said. "I'm still sitting there thinking, 'My son is traveling. He's gone somewhere.' It's such a pathetic moment."

Around 2 p.m., they told her to go home. She refused.

"I sat there firmly," Ramarao told BI.

Then, around 3:20 p.m., a long white van pulled up with the light on.

"I was waiting to see medical help or nurses or someone coming out of the van," she said. "But a stretcher came. A simple stretcher. I ran and asked the person. He said, 'We have a dead body in that apartment.'"

About an hour later, a medical examiner and police asked to speak with Ramarao one-on-one inside the apartment's office. They said that Balaji had died by suicide, and that from looking at CCTV footage, he was alone, according to Ramarao. There was no initial evidence of foul play, the department spokesperson told BI.

Balaji's parents aren't convinced. They arranged for a private autopsy, completed in early December. Ramarao said the results were atypical, but she declined to share any more details. BI has not seen a copy of the report.

Balaji's parents are working with an attorney to press the SF police to reopen the case and do a "proper investigation," Ramarao said.

Meanwhile, they and members of their community are trying to raise awareness of his case through social media and a Change.org petition. Besides seeking answers, they want to invoke a broader discussion about whistleblowers' vulnerability and lack of protections, Ramarao and a family friend, who's helping organize a an event about Balaji on December 27, told BI.

"We want to leave the question open," Ramarao said. "It doesn't look like a normal situation."

BI shared a detailed account of Ramarao's concerns and memory of November 26 with spokespeople for the SF police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. These officials did not respond or offer comments.

Ramarao emphasized to BI that the family isn't pointing fingers at OpenAI.

'Yes, mom'

Ramarao said she shared a close bond with her son. He didn't eat enough fruit, so every time she visited, she'd arrange shipments to his apartment from Costco. He tended to skip breakfast, so she'd bring granola bars and cookies.

Balaji rarely expressed his emotions and always paid for everything. But on November 7, during their last meal together, something made Ramarao try extra hard to pay, give him a ride home, and seek reassurance. He still paid for the meal and called an Uber. But he did offer his mom two words of encouragement.

"I asked him, 'Suchir this is the hardship. This is how I raised you, and if you were to choose parents now, would you choose me as mom?' He didn't think for a second,'" she said. "'Yes, mom.' And you know what? As a mother, that will keep me going as long as I'm alive."