Who was Suchir Balaji? Elon Musk’s cryptic reaction to Open AI scholar’s suicide goes viral
OpenAI scholar Suchir Balaji has sent shockwaves throughout the Internet. The 26-year-old was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. “The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the decedent as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” a spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comment or reports for publication at this time.”
Billionaire Elon Musk, known for his ongoing rivalry with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, responded to the development with a mysterious «hmm» post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Who Is Suchir Balaji?
Suchir Balaji, a former employee of OpenAI, worked with the organization from November 2020 to August 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before joining OpenAI, he studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also interned at OpenAI and Scale AI during his academic years.
During his tenure at OpenAI, Balaji contributed to various key projects. Initially, he worked on WebGPT and later joined the pretraining team for GPT-4. He also collaborated with the reasoning team on o1 and contributed to post-training efforts for ChatGPT, as outlined on his LinkedIn page.
After dedicating four years to OpenAI, Balaji decided to leave the company. In an interview with The New York Times, he revealed his growing concerns about the potential societal harm of the technology, particularly criticizing OpenAI's alleged use of
