What just happened? Another undersea cable in the Baltic Sea has been disrupted. At around 12.26 pm local time on Christmas Day, the Estlink 2 power cable linking Finland and Estonia experienced an outage. Finland said sabotage could not be ruled out as a cause. Finland's prime minister, Petteri Orpo, said the outage had not affected the country's electricity supplies. However, Reuters reports that the capacity between the countries was reduced from the installed capacity of 1,016 MW to 358 MW."The authorities remain vigilant even during Christmas and are investigating the situation," Finland's prime minister, Petteri Orpo, wrote on X.Finland prime minister Petteri OrpoAccording to Finnish public broadcaster Yle, Estlink 2 was unserviceable for several months earlier this year due to planned maintenance, but the connection was restored in September. Arto Pahkin, Operations Manager of Finnish national electricity transmission operator Fingrid, said the possibility of sabotage cannot be ruled out, adding that an investigation into the matter had been initiated.Authorities in the Baltic Sea area have been on high alert since two undersea cables a communications cable between Lithuania and the Swedish island of Gotland, and one between Finland and Germany were damaged in November. // Related StoriesTracking sites showed that Chinese bulk carrier Yi Peng 3 had sailed over the cables around the time they were cut. The Wall Street Journal reported that Western intelligence services believe the ship's Chinese captain was "induced by Russian intelligence" to damage the cables using the vessel's anchor.Earlier this week, Sweden said that China had denied a request for prosecutors to conduct an investigation on the vessel and that it had left the area.Russia has said that claims it was involved in the sabotage of undersea cables as retaliation against Western nations aiding Ukraine are "absurd" and "laughable."This month saw the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency that oversees global communication technologies, announced the formation of the International Advisory Body for Submarine Cable Resilience. As the name suggests, the organization aims to strengthen the resilience of these cables, which carry over 99% of international data exchanges.NATO is also developing a way of protecting undersea cable sabotage: a fleet of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) that will patrol high-risk naval zones in regions such as the Baltic and Mediterranean.

The tech company has made Copilot part of its 365 subscription service in several markets and raised prices.

Weather forecasts will get smarter, EVs could get pricier, crypto will be for everyday investors and AI will be everywhere

Alibaba and E-mart will combine the assets of their separate e-commerce platforms, AliExpress Korea and Gmarket, to form a 50-50 joint venture.

Voyages, both interstellar and Earth-bound, frame many new sci-fi novelsShutterstock/PHOTOCREO Michal BednarekI am writing this without (so far) having read any of the books I mention, but I believe that 2025 is shaping up to be a good year for science fiction. From what I can see, there is a lot of literary sci-fi coming our way, but perhaps less of the physics and spaceship heavy stuff, which wont suit everyone. But that may well change as new titles are announced. Here is my pick of upcoming offerings.In January, we have All the Water in the World

The brain shrinkage observed in Alzheimers may be prevented by semaglutide, the drug in OzempicZEPHYR/Science Photo Library/AlamyOzempic and Wegovy are already transforming how we treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, and from next year another condition affecting millions of people worldwide might be added to the list: Alzheimers disease.Two clinical trials investigating semaglutide, the drug in Ozempic and Wegovy, as a therapy for early Alzheimers are expected to conclude in 2025. If the results are positive, it could mark a breakthrough in treating this intractable condition.

When Dave Hodson walked through wheat fields in Ethiopia in 2010, it seemed as if everything had been painted yellow. A rust fungus was in the process of infecting about one-third of the countrys wheat, and winds had carried its spores far and wide, coating everything in their path. The fields were completely yellow. Youd walk through them and your clothes were just bright yellow, he says. Hodson, who was then at the UNs Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, had flown down to Ethiopia with colleagues to investigate the epidemic. But there was little that could be done: Though the authorities had some fungicides, by the time they realized what was happening, it was too late. Ethiopia, the biggest wheat-producing nation in sub-Saharan Africa, lost between 15% and 20% of its harvest that year. Talking with farmersthey were just losing everything, Hodson told MIT Technology Review. And its just like, Well, we should have been able to do more to help you. Hodson, now aprincipal scientist at the international nonprofit CIMMYT, has since been working with colleagues on a plan to stop such losses in the future. Together with Maricelis Acevedo at Cornell Universitys College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, he co-leads the Wheat Disease Early Warning Advisory System, known as Wheat DEWAS, an international initiative that brings together scientists from 23 organizations around the world. The idea is to scale up a system to track wheat diseases and forecast potential outbreaks to governments and farmers in close to real time. In doing so, they hope to protect a crop that supplies about one-fifth of the worlds calories. The effort could not be more timely. For as long as theres been domesticated wheat (about 8,000 years), there has been harvest-devastating rust. Breeding efforts in the mid-20th century led to rust-resistant wheat strains that boosted crop yields, and rust epidemics receded in much of the world. But now, after decades, rusts are considered a reemerging disease in Europe. Thats due partly to climate change, because warmer conditions are more conducive to infection. Vulnerable regions including South Asia and Africa are also under threat. Wheat DEWAS officially launched in 2023 with $7.3 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (now called the Gates Foundation) and the UKs Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. But an earlier incarnation of the system averted disaster in 2021, when another epidemic threatened Ethiopias wheat fields. Early field surveys by a local agricultural research team had picked up a new strain of yellow rust. The weather conditions were super optimal for the development of rust in the field, Hodson says, but the teams early warning system meant that action was taken in good timethe government deployed fungicides quickly, and the farmers had a bumper wheat harvest. Wheat DEWAS works by scaling up and coordinating efforts and technologies across continents. At the ground level is surveillanceteams of local pathologistswho survey wheat fields, inputting data on smartphones. They gather information on which wheat varieties are growing and take photos and samples. The project is now developing a couple of apps, one of which will use AI to help identify diseases by analyzing photos. Another arm of the system, based at the John Innes Centre in the UK, focuses on diagnostics. The group there, working with researchers at CIMMYT and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, developed MARPLE (a loose acronym for mobile and real-time plant disease), which Hodson describes as a mini gene sequencer about the size of a cell phone. It can test wheat samples for the rust fungus locally and provide a result within two to three days, whereas conventional diagnostics need months. The beauty of it is you could pick up something new very quickly, says Hodson. And its often the new things that give the biggest problems. The data from the field is sent directly to a team at the Global Rust Reference Center at Aarhus University in Denmark, which combines everything into one huge database. Enabling nations and globally scattered groups to share an infrastructure is key, says Aarhuss Jens Grnbech Hansen, who leads the data management package for Wheat DEWAS. Without collaborating and harmonizing data, he says, technology wont solve these problems all on its own. We build up trust so that by combining the data, we can benefit from a bigger picture and see patterns we couldnt see when it was all fragmented, Hansen says. Their automated system sends data to Chris Gilligan, who leads the modeling arm of Wheat DEWAS at the University of Cambridge. With his team, he works with the UKs Met Office, using their supercomputer to model how the fungal spores at a given site might spread under specific weather conditions and what the risk is of their landing, germinating, and infecting other areas. The team drew on previous models, including work on the ash plume from the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajkull, which caused havoc in Europe in 2010. Each day, a downloadable bulletin is posted online with a seven-day forecast. Additional alerts or advisories are also sent out. Information is then disseminated from governments or national authorities to farmers. For example, in Ethiopia, immediate risks are conveyed to farmers by SMS text messaging. Crucially, if theres likely to be a problem, the alerts offer time to respond. Youve got, in effect, three weeks grace, says Gilligan. That is, growers may know of the risk up to a week ahead of time, enabling them to take action as the spores are landing and causing infections. The project is currently focused on eight countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia in Africa and Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Bhutan in Asia. But the researchers hope they will get additional funding to carry the project on beyond 2026 and, ideally, to extend it in a variety of ways, including the addition of more countries. Gilligan says the technology may be potentially transferable to other wheat diseases, and other cropslike ricethat are also affected by weather-dispersed pathogens. Dagmar Hanold, a plant pathologist at the University of Adelaide who is not involved in the project, describes it as vital work for global agriculture. Cereals, including wheat, are vital staples for people and animals worldwide, Hanold says. Although programs have been set up to breed more pathogen-resistant crops, new pathogen strains emerge frequently. And if these combine and swap genes, she warns, they could become even more aggressive. Shaoni Bhattacharya is a freelance writer and editor based in London.

Gong Yoo returns in "Squid Game" season two as the recruiter.Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told BI he wanted to explore the character's backstory and true nature.That true nature is pretty wild and Gong embraces it in his performance.Gong Yoo's ddakji-playing recruiter is blessedly back in "Squid Game" season two and this time, his appearance is even more memorable.Gong plays the recruiter, a well-dressed, frankly unfairly attractive man who approaches people and challenges them to a game of ddakji. If they win a round, he gives them money. If they lose, he slaps them. Win-win! After enough time, he'll invite them to participate in a game with a much larger prize pool, and much more severe consequences for losing.He appears only briefly in season one to recruit Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) into the games. More memorably, he utterly trounces Gi-hun in ddakji, slapping him no less than ten times all while remaining perfectly pleasant and composed. It's enough to, if you're a true freak, make him want to slap you too.Luckily for those of us who have been thinking about this scene for the past three years, there's a whole lot more Gong Yoo in season two."I got many, many requests, people asking me to tell us the backstory about the ddakji man," creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told Business Insider. "I also thought of him to be a very intriguing character, so I wanted to bring him back again in season two and give him is own narrative."Warning: Spoilers ahead for season two, episode one of "Squid Game." Gong Yoo as the recruiter in season two of "Squid Game." No Ju-han/Netflix Gi-hun tracks down the recruiter as a means to an endIn season two, Gi-hun is a man on a mission: he wants to shut down the games, and to do so, he needs to pin down his first point of contact. That's ddakji guy, and Gi-hun enlists a veritable small army of foot soldiers to scour the Seoul subway system for people getting slapped. It's slow going until Gi-hun's former creditor Mr. Kim (Kim Pub-lae) and his associate Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho) actually manage to find him.They pursue him from the subway, to a bakery, to a convenience store, to a park, and eventually to an alleyway. Unfortunately, Mr. Kim and Woo-seok are no match for six feet of bitch-slapping recruiter, and he captures them and forces them to play a game that leaves Mr. Kim dead. Woo-seok and Mr. Kim attempt to locate the recruiter in "Squid Game." No Ju-han/Netflix When Gi-hun returns to the motel where he's taken up residence, he finds the recruiter waiting for him. During their conversation, the recruiter reveals his backstory: after getting brought into the game as a guard, he was given a gun. After killing a player who turned out to be his father, the recruiter realized that his calling was.... leading people to their violent deaths. Sure!This time, the recruiter challenges Gi-hun not to ddakji, but a modified game of Russian Roulette that will inevitably leave one of them dead. Apparently, he's a man prone to absurd melodrama, because he queues up "Time To Say Goodbye" by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman to set the tone. After trying to convince Gi-hun to acknowledge that he's a "piece of trash" like everyone else who ended up in the games, the recruiter ends up with the last bullet in the gun and after Gi-hun calls him a dog, ddakji man pulls the trigger, ending his own life.No more Mr. Nice Ddakji GuyIn season one, the recruiter was an entrancing figure because of the difference in his demeanor (perfect, poised) and actions (slapping the daylights out of people). This time, however, Hwang told BI that he wanted to not only reveal his backstory, but also, "what kind of state he is in as a human being."The answer? One untethered to anything except his objectively wild and remarkably strong convictions. This is a man who does it all harassing people already being crushed by debt, sentencing them to a death game, and murder for the love of the game. It's not really clear why he believes people, like those he recruits into the games, are trash. On the flip side, it's incredibly clear that he's a sadist who will play any game he initiates to the end, even if he has to forfeit his own life. Gong Yoo and Lee Jung-jae as the recruiter and Gi-hun in season two of "Squid Game." No Ju-han/Netflix Gong brings a charged energy to his sequences in episode one particularly his confrontation with Gi-hun that remains largely unmatched by the rest of the season. His physicality, whether it's getting up in another performer's space or spinning the barrel of a pistol, is unmatched. "Gong Yoo is an actor who's mostly taken on very sweet characters," Hwang said. "He's never done something that's as crazy or insane as this one, so I was personally curious to see how he was going to portray the character as well."In season one, it was clear that the recruiter was a tightly coiled spring. In season two, Hwang and Gong finally let him snap."Squid Game" season two is now streaming on Netflix.

BYD is chasing down Tesla on EV sales, but the Chinese giant is much more than just a car company.As well as cheap EVs, BYD also makes batteries, buses, trains and even some iPhones and iPads.BYD is following in the footsteps of Elon Musk's company, which also has lucrative side hustles.BYD has fast become one of the world's biggest electric-vehicle makers but the Chinese giant is much more than just a car company.Like its rival Tesla, BYD, which was founded in 1995 as a battery manufacturer, makes and sells a variety of products alongside its car business, from solar panels to buses.The EV giant's manufacturing expertise allows it to make nearly all of the components of its vehicles in-house, cutting down costs and enabling BYD to sell EVs for as little as $10,000.That versatility has proven a crucial advantage, helping BYD to expand rapidly in China's cut-throat EV industry and even briefly overtake Elon Musk's automaker and become world's largest producer of EVs by sales last year.Here are all of BYD's side hustles.iPads and iPhones BYD is part of the supply chain for several of Apple's products, including the iPhone. Carlos Lujan/Europa Press via Getty Images Apple has long turned to China to assemble its tablets and smartphones, and it is reportedly increasingly relying on BYD.The EV maker's manufacturing arm, BYD Electronic, now assembles more than 30% of Apple's iPad tablets and is part of the supply chain for the iPhone, according to industry executives and analysts cited by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.Apple CEO Tim Cook praised its partnership with BYD during a visit to China in March, and Apple isn't the only company that relies on BYD Electronic.EV rivals Xiaomi as well as other smartphone manufacturers Huawei and Samsung are also customers.Batteries BYD rolled out its Blade battery in 2020. VCG/VCG via Getty Images China dominates the global battery industry, and BYD is one of its biggest success stories.The automaker is the world's second-largest battery producer, behind fellow Chinese firm CATL, per data released in September by Korean market research SNE Research.In 2020, BYD rolled out its Blade battery, which the company said had "maximum safety, while offering outstanding strength, range, longevity and power."The Blade battery is now incorporated into all BYD vehicles, and the automaker also sells it to rivals such as Toyota, which uses BYD's batteries in its cars sold in China.In October, Bloomberg reported Apple had worked with BYD on designing long-range batteries for its project to build its own car, which it ultimately scrapped.Energy storage An aerial view of Tesla's megapack factory in Shanghai, which is due to start mass-production next year. VCG/VCG via Getty Images Just like its rival Tesla, BYD has been able to turn its battery know-how into a lucrative side hustle in energy storage.Tesla's energy business includes solar panels and its megapack and powerwall batteries, which provide a backup power supply for homes and businesses.BYD also sells solar panels and its battery-box system a stack of Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries that the company markets for home and commercial usage.BYD's energy storage business has grown rapidly in recent years, but the automaker may be about to face more competition from Musk with Tesla set to begin megapack production at its factory in Shanghai early next year.Buses BYD's commercial vehicle operation makes everything from forklifts to London's famous red buses. Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images BYD may not sell its cars in the US market thanks to tariffs but the company has been making buses and commercial vehicles in its Lancaster, California factory since 2013.BYD's commercial vehicle business, which makes everything from school buses to forklifts, has often entered new markets before the company's automotive arm.BYD has also been contracted to provide London's famous red double-decker buses and has struck a deal to provide Mexico City with a fleet of electric buses. The company's November figures showed it had sold around 16,400 commercial vehicles, includingaround 4,200 buses, in 2024 so far.Monorails One of BYD's monorail systems in the city of Chongqing, China. Fan Yonggen/VCG via Getty Images In addition to buses, BYD has also branched out into mass transit with its "Skyrail" monorail.The company unveiled its first single-track electric train in the Chinese city of Yinchuan in 2017. The company said the Skyrail is cheaper and easier to build than traditional subway systems.BYD has a contract to build a Metro system in the Brazilian city of So Paulo, and it is also part of a consortium developing a proposal for a monorail system in Los Angeles.

Former OpenAI employee Suchir Balaji alleged the startup violates copyright laws.His death in November reignited a debate about how top AI companies affect humanity.In an interview with BI, Balaji's mom shared his initial hopes for AI, and why they were dashed.In October, Suchir Balaji made waves when he spoke against OpenAI.In an interview with The New York Times, he discussed how powerhouse AI companies might be breaking copyright laws.OpenAI's models are trained on information from the internet. Balaji helped collect and organize that data, but he grew to feel the practice was unfair. He resigned in August. And in November, he was named by NYT lawyers as someone who might have "unique and relevant documents" for their copyright-infringement case against OpenAI."If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave," he told the Times.On November 26, the young engineer was found dead in his apartment. The tragedy struck a chord, stoking conspiracy theories, grief, and debate. What do we lose when AI models gain?In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, Balaji's mother, Poornima Ramarao, offered clues.Balaji joined OpenAI because of AI's potential to do good, she said. Early on, he loved that the models were open-source, meaning freely available for others to use and study. As the company became more financially driven and ChatGPT launched, those hopes faded. Balaji went from believing in the mission to fearing its consequences for publishers and society as a whole, she told BI."He felt AI is a harm to humanity," Ramarao said.An OpenAI spokesperson shared that Balaji was a valued member of the team, and that his passing deeply affected those who worked closely with him."We were devastated to learn of this tragic news and have been in touch with Suchir's family to offer our full support during this difficult time," the spokesperson wrote in a statement. "Our priority is to continue to do everything we can to assist them.""We first became aware of his concerns when The New York Times published his comments and we have no record of any further interaction with him," OpenAI's spokesperson added. "We respect his, and others', right to share views freely. Our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones, and we extend our deepest condolences to all who are mourning his loss."Recruited by OpenAIGrowing up, Balaji's dad thought he was "more than average," Ramarao said. But she thought her son was a prodigy. By two years old, he could form complex sentences, she recalled."As a toddler, as a little 5-year-old, he never made mistakes. He was perfect," Ramarao said.At age 11, he started learning to code using Scratch, a programming language geared toward kids. Soon, he was asking his mom, who's a software engineer, questions that went over her head. At 13, he built his own computer. At 14, he wrote a science paper about chip design."Dad would say, don't focus too much. Don't push him too much," Ramarao said. Suchir Balaji and his mom, Poornima Ramarao. Poornima Ramarao They moved school districts to find him more challenges. His senior year, he was the US champion in a national programming contest for high-schoolers, leading to him getting recruited, at 17 years old, by Quora, the popular online knowledge-sharing forum. His mom was against it, so he fibbed to her about applying. But he had to fess up by the first day on the job because he couldn't drive yet."I had to give him a ride to his office in Mountain View," Ramarao said.She was worried about how he'd handle "so many adults," but he made friends to play poker with and enjoyed Quora's abundant cafeteria.She viewed it as a lesson in learning to trust her Balaji."Then I understood, okay, my son is really an advanced person. I cannot be a hindrance to him," Ramarao said.After working for about a year, he went to UC Berkeley, and soon won $100,000 in a TSA-sponsored challenge to improve their passenger-screening algorithms.It was all enough to be recruited by OpenAI. He interned with the company in 2018, per his LinkedIn, then joined full-time in 2021 after graduating.An early standout Suchir Balaji on vacation before his death. Poornima Ramarao Over his nearly four-year tenure at OpenAI, Balaji became a standout, eventually making significant contributions to ChatGPT's training methods and infrastructure, John Schulman, an OpenAI cofounder, wrote in a social media post about Balaji."He'd think through the details of things carefully and rigorously. And he also had a slight contrarian streak that made him allergic to 'groupthink' and eager to find where the consensus was wrong," Schulman said in the post. Schulman didn't reply to BI's requests for comment.Balaji had joined the company at a critical juncture, though.OpenAI started off as a non-profit in 2015 with the explicit mission of ensuring that AI benefited all of humanity. As the startup moved away from its open-source and non-profit roots, Balaji became more concerned, Ramarao said.When it launched ChatGPT publicly in November 2022, he reconsidered the copyright implications, she said.Earlier that year, a big part of Balaji's role was gathering digital data from all corners of the English-speaking internet for GPT-4, a model that would soon power ChatGPT, per the Times interview. Balaji thought of this like a research project.Using other people's data for research was one thing, he wrote in a later essay. Using it to make a product that could take away from those creators' revenue or traffic was another.OpenAI didn't comment on Balaji's concerns to Business Insider. In court, it has argued that the legal doctrine of "fair use" protects how its models ingest publicly-available internet content."Too naive and too innocent"By late 2023 and early 2024, Balaji's enthusiasm for OpenAI had fizzled out entirely, and he began to criticize CEO Sam Altman in conversations with friends and family, Ramarao said.He used to tell his mom when he was working on "something cool," but more and more, he had nothing to say about his job, she told BI.When he resigned in August, Ramarao didn't press the issue.Come October, when she saw his bombshell interview with the Times, she unleashed a torrent of anxiety at Balaji. In shining a spotlight on what he thought was corporate wrongdoing, he was taking it all on his shoulders, she said."I literally blasted him," she said of their conversation. "'You should not go alone. Why did you give your picture? Why did you give your name? Why don't you stay anonymous? What's the need for you to give your picture?'""You have to go as a group. You have to go together with other people who are like-minded. Then he said, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm connecting with like-minded people. I'm building a team,'" she continued. "I think he was too naive and too innocent to understand this dirty corporate world."Balaji's parents are calling for an investigationWhen Balaji left OpenAI in August, he took a break."He said, 'I'm not taking up another job. Don't ask me,'" Ramarao said.From Balaji's parents' vantage point, everything seemed fine with the young coder. He was financially stable, with enough OpenAI stock to buy a house one day, she said. He had plans to build a machine learning non-profit in the medical field."He wanted to do something for society," his mom said.On November 21, a Thursday, Balaji celebrated his 26th birthday with friends while on vacation. The next day, he let his mom know when his flight home took off, and spoke with his dad on the phone before dinner. His dad wished him a happy birthday and said he was sending a gift. Suchir Balaji with friends on vacation. Poornima Ramarao According to Ramarao, the medical examiner said that Balaji died that evening, or possibly the next morning."He was upbeat and happy," she said. "What can go wrong within a few hours that his life is lost?"On Saturday and Sunday, Ramarao didn't hear from her son. She thought that maybe he'd lost his phone or gone for a hike. But on Monday, she went and knocked on his door. He didn't answer. She thought about filing a missing person complaint. But, knowing he'd have to go in-person to remove it, she hesitated. "He'll get mad at me," she said of her thinking at the time.The next morning, she called the San Francisco police. They found his body just after 1 p.m. PST, according to a spokesperson for the department. But Ramarao wasn't told or allowed inside, she said. As officers trickled in, she pleaded with them to check if his laptop and toothbrush were missing, she told BI; that way she'd know if he'd traveled."They didn't give the news to me," Ramaro said. "I'm still sitting there thinking, 'My son is traveling. He's gone somewhere.' It's such a pathetic moment."Around 2 p.m., they told her to go home. She refused."I sat there firmly," Ramarao told BI.Then, around 3:20 p.m., a long white van pulled up with the light on."I was waiting to see medical help or nurses or someone coming out of the van," she said. "But a stretcher came. A simple stretcher. I ran and asked the person. He said, 'We have a dead body in that apartment.'"About an hour later, a medical examiner and police asked to speak with Ramarao one-on-one inside the apartment's office. They said that Balaji had died by suicide, and that from looking at CCTV footage, he was alone, according to Ramarao. There was no initial evidence of foul play, the department spokesperson told BI.Balaji's parents aren't convinced. They arranged for a private autopsy, completed in early December. Ramarao said the results were atypical, but she declined to share any more details. BI has not seen a copy of the report.Balaji's parents are working with an attorney to press the SF police to reopen the case and do a "proper investigation," Ramarao said.Meanwhile, they and members of their community are trying to raise awareness of his case through social media and a Change.org petition. Besides seeking answers, they want to invoke a broader discussion about whistleblowers' vulnerability and lack of protections, Ramarao and a family friend, who's helping organize a an event about Balaji on December 27, told BI."We want to leave the question open," Ramarao said. "It doesn't look like a normal situation."BI shared a detailed account of Ramarao's concerns and memory of November 26 with spokespeople for the SF police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. These officials did not respond or offer comments.Ramarao emphasized to BI that the family isn't pointing fingers at OpenAI. Suchir Balaji with his parents. Poornima Ramarao 'Yes, mom'Ramarao said she shared a close bond with her son. He didn't eat enough fruit, so every time she visited, she'd arrange shipments to his apartment from Costco. He tended to skip breakfast, so she'd bring granola bars and cookies.Balaji rarely expressed his emotions and always paid for everything. But on November 7, during their last meal together, something made Ramarao try extra hard to pay, give him a ride home, and seek reassurance. He still paid for the meal and called an Uber. But he did offer his mom two words of encouragement."I asked him, 'Suchir this is the hardship. This is how I raised you, and if you were to choose parents now, would you choose me as mom?' He didn't think for a second,'" she said. "'Yes, mom.' And you know what? As a mother, that will keep me going as long as I'm alive."