Right, but as you note the legal definition doesn't apply here anyway, we're clearly using the colloquial definition of whistleblower. And that definition comes with the implication that powerful people would want a particular person dead.
In this case I see very little reason to believe that would be the case. No one has hinted that this employee has more damning information than was already public knowledge, and the lawsuit that he was going to testify in is one in which the important facts are not in dispute. The question doesn't come down to what OpenAI did (they trained on copyrighted data) but what the law says about it (is training on copyrighted data fair use?).
Well, I still disagree. In reality companies still retaliate against whistleblowers even when the information is already out there. (Hence the need for Congress, federal courts and the California Supreme Court to clarify that whistleblower activity is still protected even if the information is already known.)
I, of course, am not proposing that OpenAI assassinated this person. Just pointing out that disclosures of known information can and do motivate retaliation, and are considered whistleblowing.
The thread looks very different than it did when I wrote any of the above—at the time it was entirely composed of people casually asserting that this was most likely an assassination. I wrote this with the intent of shutting down that speculation by pointing out that we have no reason to believe that this person had enough information for it to be worth the risk of killing him.
Since I wrote this the tone of the thread shifted and others took up the torch to focus on the tragedy. That's wonderful, but someone had to take the first step to stem the ignorant assassination takes.
In this case I see very little reason to believe that would be the case. No one has hinted that this employee has more damning information than was already public knowledge, and the lawsuit that he was going to testify in is one in which the important facts are not in dispute. The question doesn't come down to what OpenAI did (they trained on copyrighted data) but what the law says about it (is training on copyrighted data fair use?).