The recent suspicious death of the AI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji gives us a working model for how to get information when all official sources of documents seem hell-bent on hiding evidence like cell phone records, autopsies, and police reports.
https://archive.ph/mEsPY
According to his parents, we have confirmed that he was in the Santa Monica area to prepare for his hiking trip to the island of Catalina. The most important focus now is are the people, places, and things which provide us insight into his last Birthday Weekend alive.
Of course, the San Francisco Police were no help to me at all in the week I spent bird-dogging their offices for any scrap of information I could find. How do you proceed with an investigation when the FBI doesn’t publish the metadata locations leading up to a murder or an assassination?
What do you do when law enforcement hides the metadata of the Thomas Crooks phone or the Luigi Mangione phone in the days and weeks leading up to their respective assassinations?
We work with a “People, Places, and Things” framework when we are being stymied by law enforcement, starting with the last time we knew the victim was alive. We know the last time Suchir was alive was Friday, November 22nd after Suchir returned from his Catalina Islands hiking trip to his apartment in San Francisco. But no information from law enforcement has been released about the condition they found his body in on November 26th, almost a full four days later after he did not answer calls from his mother on the 23rd and door knocks by his mother on the 25th.
In the last eight years since Donald Trump appeared on the scene, the FBI’s only mission seems to be hiding or destroying evidence by cooperating with local police departments and then launching smear campaigns against any investigative journalists digging for the truth for the American people. Most Americans remember Hillary Clinton smashing her State Department Blackberrys to hide evidence of Libya, Syria, and Ukraine coups from the American people. The Suchir Balaji investigation seems to be yet another example of authorities destroying and hiding key evidence.
We have used the People, Places, and Things methodology for the last eight years when we run into “Blackberry Smashing” evidence hiding. Still, other investigative frameworks have been used to ferret the truth from metadata evidence, like our tried and true Intelligence Funnel (Information Artistry) and Mosaic Method.
With the People, Places, and Things model, we looked intently at who the victim was last with before he died. Who did Suchir Balaji spend his last Birthday Weekend with down in Los Angeles on a hiking trip before his suspicious “suicide” in San Francisco, with no one hearing a shot in his densely packed apartment complex?
I would put these names under the People Category on the whiteboard as the most promising leads to answer the question of who Suchir Balaji spent his last birthday weekend with. The People who last saw Suchir Balaji alive will be the most important for the investigation.
I directly asked Suchir Balaji's mother and a go-between for his father these questions, but they either did not know the people Suchir spent his last weekend with or balked at telling me. So, I had to find another way, reading hundreds of Twitter profiles mentioning Suchir to find a match.
Collecting names from who he competed in programming contests in High School would be another example of places we would go to collect names like Christopher Chang and Bryan Chen. Perhaps Christopher Chang or Bryan Chen also accompanied Suchir Balaji on the April trip this year to Patagonia, and there are photos of the hike. Bryan Chen is a Lead Engineer at Scale AI where Suchir Balaji interned, and Christopher Chang is a Software Engineer at Waymo, a driverless taxi company in San Francisco.
This requires going to the social media accounts of Christopher Chang and Bryan Chen, and many of Suchir Balaji’s classmates.
The same exercise is needed for Suchir Balaji’s Open AI cohorts like Jack Hilton and others.
That laborious task led to Jacob Hilton’s Twitter profile, pictured in the pictures above's far right, lower right-hand corner. Remember, the father and mother of Suchir are posting “#JusticeForSuchir” on X (Twitter), so I assume they still believe his death may have been caused by foul play. If true, we should investigate it, even if the SFPD and the FBI are stonewalling us.
Jacob Hilton is very interesting because he left Open AI, much like Suchir Balaji, with concerns about how it was “aligning” with the intended goals of its programmers. He is also a Berkeley-trained Ph.D., so he may have known Suchir Balaji from his Berkeley days while working on his Ph.D. there. Since he was a good friend of Suchir Balaji from Open AI, could Jacob Hilton possibly have accompanied him on his “Last Birthday Weekend” trip to Los Angeles?
For some reason, a researcher also left me the name of Reiichiro Nakano from Open AI, who was associated with Jacob Hilton.
Reiichiro Nakano still works at Open AI. He is pictured in the same photograph as Jacob Hilton, the first person to the left. See the “beer photo” above.
I get many anonymous, unexplained leads like this, and I can only ask Jacob Hilton if that name means anything to him, given that he is in the same picture as him in one of the last pictures of Suchir Balaji.
These guys were mathematical geniuses, and as the above article indicates, they are all destined to become multi-millionaires if they are not already.
Another person who spoke highly of Suchir in a social media post memorializing Suchir Balaji was John Schulman, one of the early founders of Open AI.
John Schulman is one of several people who appeared to know Suchir very well, and he could be a possible source of insight into his last month and week alive.
John Schulman was one of the very early founders of Open AI since its Elon Musk days in 2018, and Schulman left Open AI the same day Suchir Balaji left for unrelated reasons. Schulman is now heading up Amazon’s Anthropic, which is more document and citation-focused than Open AI at this time. I created the graphics in this article with Open AI’s Image Generator, and Open AI has a clear lead in this area as well as with their new video generative AI, Sora.
The now-famous Miles Brundage, a bullish AI commentator, also appeared to be acquainted with Suchir Balaji. He is a possible source of information as well.
My plan is to contact all four of these individuals to see if they can help fill in the blanks between Suchir Balaji publishing his landmark AI article in the New York Times in October of this year and his suspicious death a month later. You can also help the process by posting this article on these gentlemen’s Twitter timelines. While these folks are not quite as famous as Elon Musk or Sam Altman yet, they will be household names in five years when we look back on the early days of AI.
The most important question for me is who Suchir Balaji went hiking with in Los Angeles the last week he was alive. I doubt very much Suchir would actually go hiking in Los Angeles to look at concrete at LAX. I believe he went in the direction of Santa Monica toward the Topanga Canyon area. We will see if these gentlemen have more insight.
Under the Places category on the Whiteboard, I would put these two AI conferences in San Francisco shown below as significant events and top sources of leads for additional names of persons that might know Suchir.
Questions and Possible Leads
Was Suchir at Ted AI in San Francisco on October 22-23rd, 2024?
Was he at the AI Conference in September 2024?
Here are some other people who appeared to know Suchir Balaji and could possibly be sources of insight into his last month and week alive.
As far as the Things column is concerned on the Whiteboard, Suchir’s phone and laptop would undoubtedly have a lot of this information, and I assume these items are in the possession of Suchir’s mother. She has balked at the pace I wish to move with the investigation, and I can understand that. She has lost her son. It would be difficult for her to see beyond that right now.
However, Suchir Balaji provides insight into AI questions that affect every man, woman, and child in the world—namely, the three existing Open AI lawsuits and the public fight between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over the future of AI.
See Open AI Letter To Board Of Directors To Reinstate Sam Altman And Greg Brockman. Suchir Balaji is signature 457.
To the Board of Directors at OpenAI, OpenAI is the world’s leading AI company. We, the employees of OpenAI, have developed the best models and pushed the field to new frontiers. Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms. The products we built are used by millions of people around the world. Until now, the company we work for and cherish has never been in a stronger position.
The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company. Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI. When we all unexpectedly learned of your decision, the leadership team of OpenAI acted swiftly to stabilize the company.
They carefully listened to your concerns and tried to cooperate with you on all grounds. Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence. They also increasingly realized you were not capable of carrying out your duties, and were negotiating in bad faith. The leadership team suggested that the most stabilizing path forward - the one that would best serve our mission, company, stakeholders, employees and the public - would be for you to resign and put in place a qualified board that could lead the company forward in stability.
Leadership worked with you around the clock to find a mutually agreeable outcome. Yet within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.” Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI. We are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgement and care for our mission and employees. We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join. We will take this step imminently, unless all current board members resign, and the board appoints two new lead independent directors, such as Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. 1. Mira Murati 2. Brad Lightcap 3. Jason Kwon 4. Wojciech Zaremba 5. Alec Radford 6. Anna Makanju 7. Bob McGrew 8. Srinivas Narayanan 9. Che Chang 10. Lillian Weng 11. Mark Chen 12. Ilya Sutskever 13. Barret Zoph 14. Nick Ryder 15. Alex Paino 16. Miles Brundage 17. Matt Knight 18. Peter Welinder 19. Hannah Wong 20. Diane Yoon 21. William Fedus 22. Jonathan Lachman 23. Abigail Raman 24. Abram Wiseman 25. Adam Goldberg 26. Adam Goucher 27. Adam Groth 28. Adam Hupp 29. Adam Perelman 30. Aditya Ramesh 31. Adrien Ecoffet 32. Afsha Shaikh 33. AJ Ostrow 34. Ahmed El-Kishky 35. Aidan Clark 36. Akila Welihinda 37. Alex Baker-Whitcomb 38. Alex Beutel 39. Alex Carney 40. Alex Chow 41. Alex Gee 42. Alex Nichol 43. Alex Renzin 44. Alexander Karpenko 45. Alexandre Tachard Passos 46. Ali Kamali 47. Alice Lee 48. Aliisa Rosenthal 49. Alison Harmon 50. Alison McPhail 51. Allan Jabri 52. Allie Teague 53. Allison Tam 54. Alvin (Jiahua) Wang 55. Amin Tootoonchian 56. Amol Shah 57. Ananya Kumar 58. Andre Saraiva 59. Andrew Cann 60. Andrew Kondrich 61. Andrew Peng 62. Andrew Top 63. Andrew Tulloch 64. Andrew YuXuan Liu 65. Andrey Mishchenko 66. Andy Brown 67. Angel Demirev 68. Angela Jiang 69. Angie Luo 70. Anish Tondwalkar 71. Ankush Gupta 72. Anna-Luisa Brakman 73. Anna McKean 74. Anna Tifft 75. Arka Dhar 76. Arun Vijayvergiya 77. Arvind Neelakantan 78. Ashley Pantuliano 79. Ashvin Nair 80. Atty Eleti 81. Avi Nayak 82. Avital Oliver 83. Barak Michener 84. Rebecca Waite 85. Behrooz Ghorbani 86. Belinda Truong 87. Ben Leimberger 88. Ben Rossen 89. Benjamin Burrell 90. Benjamin Sokolowsky 91. Benjamin Zweig 92. Bianca Martin 93. Billie Jonn 94. Blake Samic 95. Bob Rotsted 96. Bobby Wu 97. Bogo Giertler 98. Boris Power 99. Bowen Baker 100. Boyang Niu 101. Brandon Wang 102. 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Denny Jin 155. Derek Chen 156. Devon Lloyd 157. Diane Techer 158. Dimitris Tsipras 159. Dominic Grillo 160. Douglas Li 161. Duc Phong Nguyen 162. Duncan Findlay 163. Dylan Royan Almeida 164. Edmund Wong 165. Elena Chatziathanasiadou 166. Eliot Hijano 167. Elizabeth Tseng 168. Elizabeth Proehl 169. Elizabeth Yang 170. Emma Lalley 171. Emma Tang 172. Emily Stern 173. Erik Ritter 174. Eric Rynerson 175. Eric Sigler 176. Erica Lee 177. Ehsan Asar 178. Ethan Stock 179. Evan Morikawa 180. Faiz Munshi 181. Farouk El Hamzawi 182. Fan Wang 183. Felipe Such 184. Felipe Torres 185. Filipe de Avila Belbute Peres 186. Filippo Raso 187. Florencia Leoni Aleman 188. Foivos Tsimpourlas 189. Fotios Chantzis 190. Francis Real 191. Francis Song 192. Francis Zhang 193. Gabriel Goh 194. Garrett McCarthy 195. Gene Oden 196. Giambattista Parascandolo 197. Gideon Myles 198. Gildas Chabot 199. Glory Jain 200. Gretchen Krueger 201. Hadi Salman 202. Haidee Schwartz 203. Haiming Bao 204. Haitang Hu 205. 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Roshan James 419. Rory Carmichael 420. Rowan Zellers 421. Roy Ziv 422. Rui Shu 423. Ryan Biddy 424. Ryan Greene 425. Ryan Hartnett 426. Ryan Lowe 427. Ryan Peterson 428. Ryan Ragona 429. Sabrina Dermody 430. Sam Schoenholz 431. Samuel Wolrich 432. Sandhini Agarwal 433. Sandro Gianella 434. Sarah Shoker 435. Sarah Yoo 436. Scott Gray 437. Scott Lessans 438. Sean Grove 439. Shantanu Jain 440. Shyamal Anadkat 441. Shaun Van Weelden 442. Shengjia Zhao 443. Shengli Hu 444. Sherwin Wu 445. Shibani Santurkar 446. Shino Jomoto 447. Shirong Wu 448. Simon Posada Fishman 449. Siyuan Fu 450. Sophie Rose 451. Sowmya Ranganathan 452. Stacie Faggioli 453. Stephanie Tran 454. Stephen Petersilge 455. Steven Adler 456. Steven Heidel 457. Suchir Balaji 458. Sully Chen 459. Tabarak Khan 460. Tal Broda 461. Tal Stramer 462. Tao Wang 463. Tao Xu 464. Tarun Gogineni 465. Taylor Gordon 466. Tejal Patwardhan 467. Theresa Lopez 468. Thomas Degry 469. Thomas Dimson 470. Thomas Raoux 471. Tianhao Zheng 472. 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.....trekking along a volcano's rim w every indication of explosive immanence. There is deep desperation on the part of the perpetrators to silence their purloining of intellectual property - - no meaningful , workable AI without this theft . Rights of Humanity's Privacy, of Humanity's Ownership, of Supremacy of Life itself vs an Inanimate Machine is at stake . LET'S be real , IT IS a battle of supemacy / existence of DEAD Matter of the Machine vs the LIVING Matter of all Life upon Earth ....and, unseen in the back of the room is Our Father Creator , author of that Life, AND , along side , Satan....genius developer of DEATH . . . . . Care to bite the new 'apple' ? care to experience a 2nd inescapable Death ? then try our T*O*T*A*L AI (you'll Never Need GOD again) , n'est-ce pas ?
Recall Altman was fired by the Board of Directors in 2023. They believed he was lying to them and obscuring his motives. But then the strangest thing happened, a powerful force overrode the firing and reinstated Altman. In my decades of experience with stocks, never have I seen such a move. Who but a government or majority shareholder can pull such a stunt?