Elon Musk has responded to allegations made by the mother of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, who accused the AI company of killing her son. During a recent session with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Balaji’s mother Poornima Ramarao alleged that the Indian-origin whistleblower was killed to prevent the exposure of incriminating documents.
“On November 18, The New York Times named my son as custodian witness. Custodian witness is very very important. He had the documents against OpenAI…That was on 18th…22nd…He just came back from vacation from LA and Catalina Island the same night. They have attacked him and killed him,” Poornima said on Tucker Carlson show.
Reacting to the video of Ramarao making the allegations, Musk wrote on X, “extremely concerning”.
Earlier on, US Congressman Ro Khanna had also called for a serious and transparent investigation into the matter, writing, “I am heartbroken by your loss. Given your very serious concerns about foul play, I do believe that there should be a full and transparent investigation into the death by the FBI or appropriate agency.”
Police are yet to share an official report of Suchir’s autopsy but say the former OpenAI employee shot himself and died by suicide on December 14, 2024. The medical examiner’s office determined the manner of death to be suicide, and police officials said there is “currently, no evidence of foul play.”
Balaji’s family alleged foul play and cited the need for an FBI inquiry in the matter to “uncover the truth”.
Who was Suchir Balaji?
Suchir Balaji, who spent more than four years at OpenAI, played a key role in the development of ChatGPT.
Before working at OpenAI, Suchir Balaji studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. While in college, he interned at Scale AI and OpenAI.
According to Suchir Balaji’s LinkedIn profile, he worked on WebGPT, an experimental language model with real-time web-browsing capabilities, in his early days at OpenAI. He later joined the pre-training team for GPT-4, the reasoning team with o1, and the post-training team for ChatGPT.
