Data: Open AI Whistleblower's Suchir Balaji

Suchir Balaji Didn’t Just Blow the Whistle. He Helped Reveal the Missing Factor in the Economy.

JFK, Honoring Suchir Balaji in Finland, at MyData 2025 I met the Suchir Balaji’s parents at the Whistleblowers of America conference at the headquarters of the American Legion last August and his mother showed me countless evidence of how and why he could not have died by suicide. While I’m not qualified to debate that well here, I was able to tell her husband, another engineer, why I thought that Suchir’s last writen words were so valuable. His whistle was a blog called “ When does generative AI qualify for fair use? "

JFK with Suchir Balaji’s Parents in Washington DC About thirty days later, I took that insight to Finland for the MyData conference. There, I showed how Shannon’s logarithmic framework could help price uncertainty inside a closed decision-making system. Put plainly, I argued that your data changes how products and services are distributed across the economy. Telecom. Retail. Tech. Healthcare. Insurance. Banking. Everywhere a firm is making predictions, sorting demand, allocating resources, or managing risk, human data is already shaping outcomes.

That mattered to me because traditional economics still refuses to tell the truth about where modern value comes from. We talk about capital. We talk about labor. But we rarely talk honestly about the informational input generated by ordinary people living their lives. Suchir’s writing helped me see more clearly that this missing variable was not abstract. It was measurable.

JFK’s Single Slide during Award Speech at MyData 2025 His reference to Shannon’s logarithms helped me add a variable to the production story itself. Not just labor. Not just capital. But informational input: the reduction of uncertainty produced by human behavior, human culture, human language, and human interaction. That is what my paper tries to formalize. The economy is not merely fueled by work and machines anymore. It is trained, tuned, and continuously improved by people who are almost never recognized as contributors to the systems profiting from them.

That is why Suchir Balaji’s words stayed with me. He was writing about fair use, but the deeper issue was fair compensation. He was writing about AI, but the real subject was ownership. He was writing about training data, but what he was really exposing was a political economy built on taking human informational value, booking it as corporate gain, and calling the theft innovation.

The most simple way to explain what Suchir inspire is in what I call the Data Cap Table

or

" Y equals F of K, L, and I "

or

" Output (Y) is a function of capital (K), labor (L), and inputs (I). "

I’ve been testing this out, and given all 5 types of data or what I called in Forbes the “ 5 Degrees Of Data ”, this mathematical theory of personal data value delivers a Data Cap Table for every identifiable product in a company’s cap table.

Read The Paper

This is increasingly important in the modern day because all 500 of the S&P500 companies claim that ≥ 90% of their cap table is “intangible assets” as people’s input, bot the old brick and mortar assets we used to claim. In the next iteration of the modern economy that I’m already calling Inclusionism , the insurance and finance industries are going to have to take an another look at the valuation of human capital’s input to productivity.

I want to me clear here, productivity means a specific thing. It is a measure of inputs. The old inputs used to be two fold: capital and labor, but now they are capital (K), labor (L), and inputs (I). The equation above is coming to a market near you to assess whether we've properly valued every asset, it’s ownership, and how equity is distributed. With the emergence of Oped AI and its competitors, and economic paradigm shift is upon us. As I say in my forthcoming book The Data Union , your #PersonalData is the core input to all productivity. #DataIsLabor and #WeOweUs a #DataDividend from productivity, because you #OwnYourData.

Get The Old Book

Data Is Labor: Essays on Distributing Value To The People