Poornima Ramarao, who is the mother of Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former Open AI researcher, Douglas Engelbart Award and Turing committee nominee; has claimed foul play in her son’s death and Elon Musk has lent support to her claims. Authorities first said that Balaji died of suicide in his San Francisco apartment on November 26. But his family contests the conclusion, saying it is based on contradictions in the case and evidence of a struggle.
Instead, Poornima shared in a post on X that the police and private autopsy were leading to conflicting results. She accused authorities of prematurely labeling the incident a suicide, saying suchir’s apartment was ransacked and there were signs of a struggle in the bathroom and blood spots. Poornima has said that lobbying at San Francisco should not be used to block justice and has appealed for an FBI investigation. Musk, responding to her post, said, ‘This doesn’t seem like a suicide.’
Balaji, a UC Berkeley graduate in computer science who first pulled into OpenAI as an intern in 2018 and returned to work on projects such as WebGPT, the building blocks for ChatGPT. But in August 2024 his career at OpenAI came to an end when he resigned over ethical concerns. In a New York Times interview last month, Balaji said that he had criticized OpenAI for using copyrighted data and more generally that ChatGPT and other similar AI technologies are bad for the Internet.
Balagi Ramamurthy, Suchir’s father, says there were no signs of depression, and that his son was keen to see how his family was doing in January. The family adds that it spoke to Suchir during their last conversation, and he was content and in good spirits. An investigation into the mysterious circumstances of Balaji’s death and his mother’s push for further investigation has led to wider attention over any foul play in what his family initially believed was a suicide.
