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Former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji’s mother, Poornima Rao, thanked Elon Musk and for his social media company X where she “can bring the truth to the public.”

Rao lamented that the media was not covering the incident impartially.

“Thank you for the X platform where we can openly express our concerns about the facts without fear of being killed. When the media doesn’t cover the situation, we have X to bring the truth to the public. I would like the TV channel to pick this up impartially,” she wrote in an article on X.

Rao also asked Musk for help and reaffirmed his belief that his son’s death was not a suicide in an interview with businessman Mario Nawfal. She also said that her child was very disturbed by OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit business model.

“The reason he joined OpenAI was his belief that AI would help humanity,” she told Nawfal. “When OpenAI became a for-profit company, its concerns began to grow.”

The death of Suchir Balaji, OpenAI whistleblower, has reignited the debate on transparency in the development of artificial intelligence. His family and others, including Elon Musk, have questioned the circumstances surrounding the police-decreed death. Musk has previously expressed skepticism about the official ruling on suicide, saying: “It doesn’t look like suicide.”

Balaji, a vocal critic of the artificial intelligence industry’s reliance on copyrighted data, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. Authorities initially ruled his death a suicide, but Balaji’s family raised concerns about the circumstances, citing evidence suggesting foul play. This tragic news highlighted the unresolved ethical and legal dilemmas surrounding generative AI technologies, issues that Balaji has passionately debated throughout his career.

Balaji, 25, was widely considered a rising star in the tech world. During his nearly four-year tenure at OpenAI, he played a central role in collecting and organizing large amounts of Internet data to train AI models like GPT-4, the foundation of ChatGPT. His early enthusiasm for AI’s transformative potential gradually gave way to disillusionment when he witnessed what he called the industry’s “reckless and exploitative” practices.

Earlier, in the aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election, Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) to urge users to take an active role in sharing and fact-checking information on the platform. After Donald Trump’s projected victory, Musk criticized mainstream media’s coverage of the election, saying it had misled the public, and positioned X as an alternative for those seeking accurate information.