Joseph Miller's Shortform

Joseph Miller

This is an attempt to compile all publicly available primary evidence relating to the recent death of Suchir Balaji, an OpenAI whistleblower.

This is a tragic loss and I feel very sorry for the parents. The rest of this piece will be unemotive as it is important to establish the nature of this death as objectively as possible.

I was prompted to look at this by a surprising conversation I had IRL suggesting credible evidence that it was not suicide. The undisputed facts of the case are that he died of a gunshot wound in his bathroom sometime around November 26 2024. The police say it was a suicide with no evidence of foul play.

Most of the evidence we have comes from the parents and George Webb. Webb describes himself as an investigative journalist, but I would classify him as more of a conspiracy theorist, based on a quick scan of some of his older videos. I think many of the specific factual claims he has made about this case are true, though I generally doubt his interpretations.

Webb seems to have made contact with the parents early on and went with them when they first visited Balaji's apartment. He has since published videos from the scene of the death, against the wishes of the parents^[1] and as a result the parents have now unendorsed Webb.^[2]

List of evidence:

He didn't leave a suicide note.^[3]
The cause of death was decided by the authorities in 14 (or 40, unclear) minutes.^[4]
The parents arranged a private autopsy which "made their suspicions stronger".^[5]
The parents say "there are a lot of facts that are very disturbing for us and we cannot share at the moment but when we do a PR all of that will come out."^[6]
The parents say "his computer has been deleted, his desktop has been messed up".^[7]
- Although the parents also said that their son's phone and laptop are not lost and are in escrow.^[8]^[9] I think the claim of the computer being deleted is more up-to-date, but I'm not sure as that video was posted earlier.
It was his birthday and he bought a bike on the week of his death.^[10]
He said he didn't want to work and he was going to take a gap year, "leaving the AI industry and getting into machine learning and neuroscience" but also he was planning to start his own company and was reaching out to VCs for seed funding.^[11]
He had just interviewed with the New York Times and he was supposed to do further interviews in the days after his death.^[12]
According to the parents and Webb, there are signs of foul play at the scene of death:
- There are several areas with blood, [Confirmed from pictures] suggesting to Webb and the parents he was trying to crawl out of the bathroom.^[13]^[14]
- Webb says the body had bleeding from the genitals.^[15] I'm not aware of a better source for this claim, so right now I think it is probably false.
- The trash can in the bathroom was knocked over.^[13]^[16] [Confirmed from pictures].
- A floss pick is on the floor.^[13]^[17] [Confirmed from pictures]. Webb interprets this as being dropped at the time of death, suggesting that Balaji was caught by surprise.
- The path of the bullet through the head missed the brain. I'm not sure what the primary source for this is, but I'm not sure why Webb would invent this, so I think it's true. Webb takes this as evidence that it was shot during a struggle rather than at the considered pace of a suicide.^[18]
  - The bullet did not go all the way through the head, suggesting a lower caliber, quiet gun.^[19]
- According to Webb and the parents, the drawers of the apartment were ransacked, the cupboards were thrown open.^[8]^[20] From the pictures this looks false, although the apartment is very messy and his hiking backpacks are strewn around with much of their contents on the table (he had recently returned from a hiking trip).
- The blood on the sink looks different, suggesting to Webb that it came from a different part of the body.^[21] This is not obvious to me from the pictures but not implausible and the main pool of blood looks surprisingly dark.
- There is a half-eaten meal at the desk in the apartment. [Confirmed from pictures].
- There is a tuft of Balaji's hair, soaked in blood, under the bathroom door. [Confirmed that's what it looks like in the pictures], again suggesting to Webb a violent struggle.
According to the parents, he had a USB thumb drive which is now missing, containing important evidence for an upcoming court case about OpenAI's use of copyrighted data.^[8]^[22]
People that spoke to him around the time of his death report him to have been in high spirits and making plans for the near future.^[23]
George Webb claims there were security cameras working all on floors except the floor which he lived on.^[24] This appears to conflict with the parents' claim that the police said no one came in or out (see below), but may be referring to different cameras, as the parents also mention that the murderer could have come through a different entrance to the main one.^[25]
The parents say "OpenAI has deleted the copyright data that was evidence that was given to the discovery for the [New York Times] lawsuit. They deleted the data and now my son is also gone, so now they're all set for winning the lawsuit... It's also said that my son had the documentation to prove the copyright violation. His statement, his testimony would have turned the AI industry upside down..."^[26]
- Looking into the details of this, OpenAI did delete some data but this wasn't a permanent deletion of any of the primary sources and I think it was probably an accident and not significant to the outcome of the case.
- I don't see any strong reason to believe Balaji had secret evidence that would have been critical to the outcome of the case.
Ilya Sutskever had two armed bodyguards with him at NeurIPS.

Evidence against:

One reason the authorities gave for declaring it a suicide was that CCTV footage showed that no one else came in or out of the apartment.^[27]
In high school Balaji won a $100,000 prize for a computer science competition. His parents didn't find out until they saw the news online, suggesting he may not have been very open with them.^[28]

My interpretations:

If we interpret the apartment as simply messy (as it looks to me), rather than ransacked, then we can probably discount the knocked-over trash can, the floss pick on the floor and the half-eaten meal. We can also probably discard the hypothesis of someone trying to locate a USB drive with secret information, which raises more questions than it answers (why didn't he reveal this information before? why didn't he back up this crucial data anywhere?).
In my uninformed view, it doesn't look like the pictures of the scene of death strongly suggest a struggle between murderer and victim, although I don't know how to explain the tuft of hair.
The motivations of OpenAI or some other actor to murder a whistleblower are unlikely. The most plausible to me is that they want to send a warning to other potential whistleblowers, but this isn't very compelling.
There's no smoking gun and the parents (understandably) do not look like they are thinking very systematically to establish a case for foul-play. This is notable because their claim of foul-play is the main factor that privileged this hypothesis to credible people.
Balaji appeared from the outside to be a happy and highly successful person with important plans in the next few days. It is surprising that someone like that would commit suicide.

Overall my conclusion is that this was a suicide with roughly 96% confidence. This is a slight update downwards from 98% when I first heard about it and overall quite concerning.

I encourage people to trade on this related prediction market and report further evidence.

Useful sources:

^{^}
I'm not linking to this evidence here, in the spirit of respecting the wishes of the parents, but this is an important source that informed my understanding of the situation.
^{^}
https://x.com/RaoPoornima/status/1876101052065558998
^{^}
Source: Poornima Ramarao (11:22)
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Source: Poornima Ramarao (12:38)
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Source: Poornima Ramarao (13:02)
^{^}
Source: Poornima Ramarao (15:47)
^{^}
Source: Poornima Ramarao (16:36)
^{^}
Source: George Webb + Poornima Ramarao (1:45)
^{^}
Source: George Webb (9:56)
^{^}
Source: (23:27)
^{^}
Source: (8:02)
^{^}
Source: (26:00)
^{^}
Source: George Webb + Poornima Ramarao (0:35)
^{^}
Source: George Webb (6:53)
^{^}
Source: George Webb (3:38)
^{^}
Source: George Webb (5:44)
^{^}
Source: George Webb (5:46)
^{^}
Source: George Webb (0:05)
^{^}
Source: George Webb (6:23)
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Source: George Webb (9:12)
^{^}
Source: Poornima Ramarao (1:18)
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Source: George Webb (9:45)
^{^}
Source: Poornima Ramarao (4:30)
^{^}
Source: George Webb (9:30)
^{^}
Source: Poornima Ramarao (2:40)
^{^}
Source: Poornima Ramarao (4:14)
^{^}
Source: Poornima Ramarao (12:42)
^{^}
Source: Ramamurthy (17:37)
^{^}
Source: George Webb (13:29)
^{^}
Source: George Webb (5:43)

Joseph Miller2y*1520

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Joseph Miller2y100

Ilya Sutskever had two armed bodyguards with him at NeurIPS.

Some people are asking for a source on this. I'm pretty sure I've heard it from multiple people who were there in person but I can't find a written source. Can anyone confirm or deny?

6Joseph Miller2y

That would be difficult. To purchase a gun in California you have to provide photo ID[1], proof of address[2] and a thumbprint[3]. Also it looks like the payment must be trackable[4] and gun stores have to maintain video surveillance footage for up to year.[5] My guess is that the police haven't actually invested this as a potential homicide, but if they did, there should be very strong evidence that Balaji bought a gun. Potentially a very sophisticated actor could fake this evidence but it seems challenging (I can't find any historical examples of this happening). It would probably be easier to corrupt the investigation. Or the perpetrators might just hope that there would be no investigation. There is a 10-day waiting period to purchase guns in California[5], so Balaji would probably have started planning his suicide before his hiking trip (I doubt someone like him would own a gun for recreational purposes?). [...] I think it's this piece that was published before his death. [...] Epistemic status: highly uncertain: my impressions from searching with LLMs for a few minutes. It's fairly common for victim's families to contest official suicide rulings. In cases with lots of public attention police generally try to justify their conclusions. So we might expect the police to publicly state if there is footage of Balaji purchasing the gun shortly before his death. It could be that this will still happen with more time or public pressure. 1. ^ https://www.fastbound.com/ffl-bound-book-software-features/dros/ 2. ^ https://giffords.org/lawcenter/state-laws/background-check-procedures-in-california/ 3. ^ https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/citation/quotes/7066 4. ^ https://apnews.com/article/gun-stores-firearms-mass-shootings-credit-cards-abe3a28ea7117340d9a4a8bcde3693fe 5. ^ https://giffords.org/lawcenter/state-laws/gun-dealers-in-california/

8Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali2y

I don't understand how Ilya hiring personal security counts as evidence, especially at large events like a conference. Famous people often attract unwelcome attention, and having professional protection close by can help deescalate or deter random acts of violence, it is a worthwhile investment in safety if you can afford it. I see it as a very normal thing to do. Ilya would be vulnerable to potential assassination attempts even during his tenure at OpenAI.