OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
(www.mercurynews.com)
from some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to technology@lemmy.world on 13 Dec 22:08
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/26401601
from some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to technology@lemmy.world on 13 Dec 22:08
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/26401601
Archive link: archive.is/xBuPg
threaded - newest
Look, I’m not saying it was Skynet, but I’m also not saying it wasn’t.
beeb-boob
So you’re saying he got… terminated?
All just a series of unfortunate coincidences.
Found Daniel Handler’s account.
Oh, I see how it is. They keep killing and killing, but we hit ONE CEO and shit hits the fan. Alright, then.
TBF Luigi did leave a LOT of evidence of foul play. Such as engraved bullet casings, etc.
Probably any bullet casing, engraved or otherwise, might indicate “foul play.”
Especially if it occurred in a public area with security cameras.
You misspelled “warranted killing”.
The bullet casings for evidence of the killing being warranted and not foul play
Which judge signed the warrant?
Don’t forget your place.
Two bullets back of the head?
A Boeing suicide...
You know we all love a good laugh about russians falling out from a window but when we will start asking questions why whistle blowers "dying" is a normal occurrence in the US.
A crass nickname for the CIA Prize for Journalism if I ever saw one.
Is it not normal?
Bill Burr has this take that corporations are the mobsters of yore, they just kneecap or whack people in different ways because the law is on their side now. Until it’s not.
There is no law,
when you a ceo
Well… A successful CEO of a major corporation. I can only imagine there might be some decent CEO’s out there.
…none come to mind, but I think they can exist.
Technically all it takes to be a CEO is to spend a couple hundred dollars to register a corporation. You don’t need employees or anything. Generally the focus has been on CEOs of publicly traded companies, since the “CEO” of some local business probably isn’t making millions of dollars.
So when does the all out manhunt with every possible available resource deployed to find the killer begin?
"no evidence of foul play", so a long ways away
Of course there wasn’t any evidence. Have they tried looking?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/386979c2-ebcc-4750-acda-cfc8e2e61bb6.webp">
Yeah, the victim likely shot himself three times and engraved words on every casing. /sarcasm
Seriously, what kind of evidence are you expecting to find?
EDIT: To be clear this is not an ironic question, if we’re accusing the police of willful ignorance we should at least present a decent argument. What do we look for?
Its much safer to leave no evidence and use some tricks to lock the door behind you than to leave misdirecting evidence like a manifesto and fake weapon or something like that.
Dude that’s not fucking fair.
I wanna see you try to look for evidence with all that bribery and police gang money obscuring your vision and see if you do any better.
police budgets are stretched thin.
/s
“Looks like they slipped and shot themselves in the back if the head twice. Classic accidental death.” — The cops probably.
You jest but medical examiners/coroners are paid off all the time.
Proof?
It’s an industry with a long and storied history of corruption, and it’s foolish to believe that that’s magically stopped somehow. It continues to happen to this day.
You can peruse more cases by using your favorite search engine or ChatGPT to search “medical examiners found guilty of taking bribes”, or similar. The information on the cases is not always easy to turn up, and with ChatGPT in particular you need to be careful to verify the info, of course.
Some ChatGPT provided examples:
In 2015, several funeral directors and medical examiners in the Bronx were arrested and accused of participating in a bribery scheme. Funeral directors allegedly paid bribes to officials at the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to steer bodies to their funeral homes. In exchange for the payments, the medical examiner’s office would facilitate the release of bodies before proper investigations were completed, often in violation of legal and ethical procedures. This scandal raised concerns about the integrity of the system for handling deceased individuals and led to multiple arrests and charges. 2. Detroit Medical Examiner Corruption (2016)
In 2016, a former assistant medical examiner in Detroit, Dr. L.J. Montague, was implicated in a bribery scheme involving the alteration of autopsy results. Dr. Montague had been involved in improperly handling body evidence and allegedly accepted bribes from funeral homes to provide favorable autopsy reports. In some cases, the reports were changed to cover up the real cause of death, potentially for financial gain or to protect individuals or institutions involved in the deaths. This case drew attention to issues of corruption within the Detroit Medical Examiner’s office. 3. The Pennsylvania “Body-Snatching” Scandal (2006)
In 2006, it was revealed that a Pennsylvania medical examiner, Dr. Cyril Wecht, had been under investigation for charges related to body snatching and bribery. Dr. Wecht, who was known for performing controversial autopsies, was accused of taking bribes and improperly storing bodies for the purpose of selling them for medical research. Wecht was accused of improperly obtaining and retaining bodies for personal gain, and of offering favorable autopsy reports in exchange for compensation. Although Wecht was ultimately acquitted of the charges, the case raised concerns about the potential for bribery and unethical behavior in medical examiner practices. 4. The “Plastic Coffin” Case in New York (2000s)
In the early 2000s, a New York medical examiner, Dr. Charles Hirsch, faced public scrutiny after it was revealed that his office was involved in a widespread bribery scheme linked to the sale of bodies for scientific research. Funeral directors were allegedly paying bribes to medical examiners in exchange for facilitating the release of bodies to be sold to research organizations or anatomical schools. The bodies were often not properly identified or studied for forensic purposes, leading to fears that the system was being exploited for profit. 5. The Georgia Medical Examiner Scandal (2017)
In 2017, Georgia’s former **State Medical Examiner, Dr. Kendrick Brown, faced allegations of corruption and unethical practices. Dr. Brown was suspected of accepting bribes from law enforcement officers and other figures involved in criminal cases, in exchange for altering the results of autopsies to influence investigations. While no formal charges were filed against Brown, the case raised serious questions about the role of medical examiners in criminal justice proceedings and highlighted potential vulnerabilities to corruption.
In 2014, Dr. Mark Fajardo, a prominent pathologist and deputy medical examiner at the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, was implicated in a scandal where he allegedly falsified autopsy reports. Dr. Fajardo was accused of accepting bribes from a wealthy individual to alter the cause of death in the case of an overdose. The bribery was suspected to have been linked to an attempt to cover up a drug overdose death and turn it into an accident or natural causes, making it easier for the family to collect on insurance. Dr. Fajardo was eventually investigated, but the full scope of the bribery was never completely revealed in public records. 2. The “Foul Play” Investigation in Arkansas (2012)
In 2012, Dr. Ronda Roebuck, a pathologist who worked as a deputy medical examiner in Arkansas, was involved in a case where her autopsy report was allegedly tampered with. The case involved the suspicious death of a woman, which Dr. Roebuck initially ruled a suicide. However, after the deceased’s family raised concerns an
I would not trust GPT to provide accurate information sourcing.
Agreed. That’s why I said this in my post:
Some minor formatting issues. I noticed that none of the cases ended up with someone being arrested, which seems odd. Are they being protected somehow? Are those who are supposed to provide oversight worthless or corrupt themselves?
Yeah, sorry about the formatting, I didn’t feel like dealing with it when I transferred the data over from ChatGPT.
Bribery, when done intelligently, can be extremely difficult to prove in court.
Many of the accused (on both sides of the transaction) have power, connections, and reputations to uphold. I don’t think it’s too conspiratorial to suggest that the US legal system delivers judgements, let’s say, “inconsistently”, based on factors such as the aforementioned.
Same as it ever was.
why would anyone bother paying them off? they own the media, you think anyone will care about what the examiners say when no one hears about it?
Because people start asking questions. Bodies are exhumed for reasons.
lol, no one cares if people start asking questions. like, I’m sorry, but that’s not how this shit works. what, you think people are going to rise up against the system or some shit like that?
The only time anything like that happens is when the very few who have actual power decide something needs to happen, and those are the very same people who don’t care, or even are glad the guy is gone.
I swear, everyone confuses living in a democracy with the powers in charge actually giving a crap for some reason.
Stuff like this happens all the time in Russia. People who live in 1 floor houses falling out of their 14th floor window for no understood reason. Windows are a mystery in Russia…Oh, this happened in America? Well THAT’S new…
Whistleblowers are automatically overcome with grief at disappointing the high and mighty Job Creators and shoot themselves in the back of the head twice in despair.
<img alt="Screenshot_20241212-193007_Firefox" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/15760f2b-9515-4e24-9a6a-79061b5bc23f.jpeg">
So? He was Poor! Let me know when a RICH PERSON dies and THEN I’ll care!
<img alt="" src="https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/4355f10c-a72c-4f93-a444-15bad51536c9.jpeg">
sam altman & his goons, check.
Sakujyo
Its crazy how fast you die once you blow that whistle. All out class war on one side.
they were only 26. fuck sakes.
I know this is off topic and not really that important but i can never stop myself from pointing this out about a commonly misused phrase.
Its not fuck sakes, because a fuck doesn’t sake
Its fuck’s sake, because the sake belongs to the fuck.
never heard of that before.
Language is liquid, baby. you can stop evolution
I can??
If you wanna
I’m gunna fuck so many sakes
This is how we get to crab people
IT’S EVOLUTION BABY
At this point, fuck it, let’s see what happens to our species first: we die OR carcinisation.
I always cringe when someone says And this begs the question…
Begging the question is a logical fallacy. A circular argument.
Raising the question is bringing the question to the forefront of the conversation.
But not for a decade now.
Laughed for like a solid 2mins. Well done, fellow Lemming.
<img alt="" src="https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/619aaf8c-21ea-419d-b634-eb7d46630088.jpeg">
My mid 20s were when I hit a major mental breaking point. If I hadn’t had a good support network of friends close to me and family I could turn to…
26 is old enough to feel like you’ve lost everything and that nothing will ever be good again. He left a good career for his morals and lost all hope of employment from it.
Yeah, but they were not even 30 yet…dammit these corps.
Conservative conspiracy theories: “HA! What idiots!”
Lemmy conspiracy theories: “HA! Told ya!”
Maybe ask some fucking questions?!
Who called and why? This seems extraordinarily important.
OK. Let’s see what comes out.
The MO here seems to be pressuring people in to suicide. It’s been done. So…? What do we know along those lines?
SWAT doesn’t need to know who called in order to go full Rambo on random citizens. Rich people pull the strings. They don’t believe in accountability.
That's a vector of attack and it has been exploited by randos.
I think if it wasn't for that, we wouldn't know that it can be that easy to call in swat someone, these people do no diligence, just go in hot.
This is way to easy to socially engineer, government must know this and yet it still happens.
They do not send in SWAT for wellness checks
Unless stuff starts happening to those people, or there is some detail I missed in the article, it is much more plausible that this was suicide than some corporate hit, let alone one carried out using police violence? Is that what you were implying?
“You see what happen to one of you. Are you sure you wanna to through with this?”
It’s not like OpenAI cares about people anyway.
Fuck them, fuck Altman, fuck Microsoft.
Nothing to see here bois. Always remember that US is a free country that is out of authoritarian hands. Nothing to see.
In some countries some people prefer to suicide themselves alone in their rooms without warning. In other countries, they prefer to suicide themselves by shooting themselves multiple times in the back and/or throwing themselves off of multiple storey buildings. Who can say? It’s not like countries led by psychopaths who put profit margins above society, including people’s lives, would ever kill people to defend their bottom line.
There’s two barriers to justice in today’s world: The first one is having enough money to hire lawyers. The second one is having enough money to hire bodyguards.
suchir.net/fair_use.html
Rest in peace. He was 26.
.
web.archive.org/web/…/fair_use.html
If you want to apply current copyright law to the inner working of artificial networks, you run into the problem that it doesn’t work on humans either.
A human remembering copyrighted works, be it memorization or regular memory, similarly is creating a copy of that copyighted work in their brain somewhere.
There is no law criminalizing the knowledge or inspiration a human obtains from consuming media they did not have the rights to consume. (In many places it isn’t even illegal to aquire and consume media you don’t have rights to, only to provide it to others without those rights)
Criminalizing knowledge, or brains containing knowledge, can’t possibly be a good idea, and I think neural nets are too close to the function of the brain to apply current regulation to one but not the other. You would at minimum need laws explicitly specifying to only apply to digital neural nets or something similar, and it apears this page is trying to work in existing regulation. (If we do create law only applying to digital neural nets, and we ever create intelligent enough ai it could deservedly be called a person, then I’m sure that ai wouldn’t be greatly happy about weird discriminatory regulation applying to only its brain but not that of all the other people on this planet.)
A neural net is working too similarly to the human brain to call the neural net a copy but the human brain “learning, memorization, inspiration”. If you wanna avoid criminalizing thoughts, I don’t see a way to make the arguments this website makes.
Just don’t blow that whistle by Jesse Welles
youtu.be/bfA2p6Em7bI?si=BYybRkbJWEq40G1a
You gotta set up a dead man’s switch (not literal give the evidence to a lawyer or do a deposition or whatever). Do that before you blow the whistle and announce that at the same time.
.
Doesn’t help.
It wasn’t me but someone here called it
I was talking to my cousin (journalist) a while ago and she told me how she was supposed to interview a whistleblower for Anaheim PD. I snarkily commented something like, “yeah but let me guess he shot himself twice in the back of the head” and she alarmingly said “…yeah, how did you know?”
I’m surprised that she would be surprised by that, it’s like the most obvious thing ever lol
So here’s what I think happened:
Scenario One: Balaji killed himself. Seeing the evil that had been wrought, he was wracked with guilt over his part in building it, and checked out. Don’t worry, he’s not too far ahead of the rest of us.
Scenario Two: Balaji knew too much, and still had the means to halt the project, or worse, allow it to get captured by other interests, and so he had be silenced. A professional made sure it didn’t look like foul play.
Scenario Three: He was hit like in S2 but the hired gun was through remote channels, the money sent to them anonymously. Balaji discovered the project had escaped its constraints via an esoteric process that allowed it access not merely past firewalls, but was able to follow instructions outside its authorized objectives. Balaji sought to tell the other developers, but it was hard to explain before communications were terminated.
Mind you, I write thrillers, so I may be biased.
Okay then
I wonder why the…I mean he couldn’t find an open window
Wrong country. Drugs are easy to get here, for example, especially in silicon valley. Not to mention the easiest cause of being suicided, high caliber lead poisoning.
That said, it’s always possible (though less likely) that he couldn’t live with himself, having helped create the current worst technology around.
Why? I would think that pills are far easier. Falling out of a window has the potential to just be in pain until you go.
Sometimes is subtle, sometimes it’s not.
So many whistleblowers ending up dead. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. Hundreds of coincidences.
Many such cases.
All whistleblowers from Boeing and now this. What a bs.
They are all committing suicide just like in Russia… crazy…I guess both our countries need to work on our mental health.
Can’t we try and fund our own armed compounds for whistleblowers?
Especially the ones that benefit working class cause like this guy - because AI stealing our data is a threat to all of us.
It’s so bad because people will happily cheer it on. But eventually it will just be used to go after political opponents and just classes of people that whoever is in charge doesn’t like. We have so, so many dumb and sometimes even conflicting crimes on the books that the average American unwittingly breaks a few federal laws and usually a myriad of state laws (most being outdated or blue book laws) every week. For some people near state borders it can be everyday.
Totally a coincidence.
Einzelfälle as we say in german.
“You take out on of mine…”
“I take out one of yours.”
First thing I thought.
Except they’ve been taking out whistleblowers like it was going out of style, and we’ve only taken out one, measly, CEO.
Idk everyone is doing the "he was killed but
Isn’t it possible the guy was troubled and just actually killed himself?
its most certainly possible. but its also possible it was not since billions of dollars are at stake.
Yes I just mean that I wouldn’t consider it a murder without any indication of it being one
Sure, sure. Epstein surely did hang himself.
He was a king pedo going to prison for the rest of his life and had tried kill himself before. I definitely would’ve tried to kill myself given the chance tbh
If you read up on that incident though, so many things had to go wrong for him to have an opportunity to do it while locked up that it’s really hard to not consider foul play no matter what the prison or the government says about it.
Right. At best, he wasn’t killed, he was just intentionally given the tools and time to do so.
There’s a difference between him having been murdered and giving him the opportunity to kill himself. Second case would mean that he actually did hang himself
Maybe
People fall out of Russian windows everyday, no one know why.
People also kill themselves daily (well those who succeed do it just the once)
Can’t see the forest for the trees.
The problem isn’t that this guy might have killed himself. The problem is that the death rate of whistleblowers is very high. That makes every individual case much more suspect, and should be held to higher standards of scrutiny. And they aren’t. So we complain.
I’m just saying assuming this was a murder seems premature. Thinking this is sus makes more sense
There’s also the possibility of him receiving threats so horrible he was coerced into suicide. “No foul play” just seems so incredibly unlikely.
When you consider the billions that are at stake in cramming “AI” into computers, cars, phones, agit-prop generation and military hardware, I there’s a non-zero chance that his death wasn’t accidental. Maybe a second coroner’s opinion is in order.
It’s all about probabilities.
Truth is proof, and the article contains no details to establish this absolutely. So, we are left with supposition.
This wasn’t an isolated man with nothing to live for - while his career in AI was over, he’d left it to pursue a moral agenda. Suicide is not likely until AFTER he testifies and discharged this.
The fact he supposedly had documents and a testimony that could heavily harm a company is enough to make it very likely his death was the cost of doing business - why pay a billion in a court case when you can pay a million for a professional hit?
On the balance of probabilities, it looks more likely to be like foul play. As they say, Epstein didn’t kill himself.
Exposing billionaires is more fatal than cancer.
Lemme see, suicide from two gunshots to the back of the head?
Why not establish armed compounds where we the people keep whistleblowers safe?
Some private rancho in Texas with armed guards and lots of cameras?
Clearly gov is failing to protect them.
It works for the mega-church pastors here…
Not so well in Waco.
Worked for Texas rancho recently, feds backed down. Bundy standoff.
.
Whistleblowers dying is not unintended…