PewDiePie vs OpenAI
Super surprising to see PewDiePie's name pop up on my socials again after so long! I remember crowding around my friend's iPhone 5 to watch his YouTube gameplay over a decade ago...
I remember when he came to Singapore for an award ceremony at MBS, and I got the chance to bro-fist him in 2013, which feels like a lifetime ago...
I'm definitely interested to see how this plays out.
Here I'll jot down some quick notes on what I know so far!
Situation Summary:
PewDiePie has released his custom local AI model - Ajax, designed for users to run privately on their home PC for everyday web searching, email, and calendar management.
While developing Ajax, he was banned from OpenAI twice for “distillation”: using OpenAI to generate training data for his own AI model development.
YouTube Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODDJXGY_1kQ
My Notes on the Video
(Mostly content from Pewdie’s video, personal comments are indicated by //)
Ajax Introduction
Ajax is a fine-tuned AI model that can browse the web, do private searches, write your emails, manage your calendar, etc.
Ajax is tuned for the Odysseus harness.
Ajax is a private “first base” foundation, it does not collect any data whatsoever from its users.
Most other open source projects also collect user data, but not this one.
Instead of stealing data, Pewdiepie hoped to ask his follower base to donate their data.
Creating data.pewdiepie.com for people to submit their data.
He tried to reduce friction and made tutorials, but still no one submitted their data…
// Wtf is the difference between Ajax and Odysseus systems? What exactly are they?
// Also, it's nice that they're named after the rival Greek heroes, with convenient timing after most people are now familiar with some of the mythology post-release of the Odysseus movie.
// Hmm but Ajax did go temporarily insane and killed because of his hallucinations though, so maybe not the best name for an AI model when everyone is still fighting to reduce AI hallucinations…
OpenAI and Decryption
He went to OpenAI to distil a bit - to increase the performance of his smaller AI model, he can distil the knowledge from a larger model to train on
// To Study: Knowledge Distillation Wiki Page
// Also TIL that "distil" is UK English. "distill" is American English.
He wanted to distil OpenAI's GPT -5.6 Sol model because he liked it.
The problem was that OpenAI encrypts their reasoning tokens, all the information that gives it chain-of-thought thinking on how it solves the problem.
Pewdiepie found a study that decrypts the data using their own API, and it worked.
// To Study: Reasoning tokens, chain-of-thought thinking in AI
// To Study: Data Encryption
// To Study: arXiv - stealing reasoning traces from proprietary LLM APIs
Pewdiepie then went on to talk about how these giant tech companies “worked hard” to steal everyone’s data to make their AI machines. How dare we, as consumers, take part of their hard work stolen from us?
RIP he got banned from OpenAI, appealed and got accepted.
Then he ran OpenAI GPT Sol again to create his model’s training seed data, and OpenAI banned him a second time.
// This ofc brings up the very interesting ethical and legal debate surrounding AI developers collecting and scraping internet data, there is plenty of ongoing discussion on privacy, data ownership concerns, lack of opt-out options, consent, uncompensated use of personal content, etc.
// I don’t have answers to questions about the fairness of data collection and use, but it is fascinating to hear different perspectives and to weigh the trade-off between the convenience of powerful AI tools and digital ethics.
// Before watching the video, I also did not expect Pewdiepie to be so vocal about his takes on AI and data collection, but it makes sense given that his internet presence would also be subject to lots of scrutiny, surveillance, and data harvesting.
Decensoring AI
Decensoring AI is like removing its ability to say No.
Pewdiepie compared it to brain surgery:
Imagine I’m asking you for your deepest, darkest secret.
You are thinking it in your head.
You don’t even have to answer it out loud.
I am actually running an MRI scan on your brain right now, and I can spot exactly what part of your brain was active when you refused to answer it.
I “zippity zap” it (remove it)
By repeatedly feeding the AI model all these different dialogues that it does not want to reply to, it is possible to identify the parts responsible for the AI model’s censorship (data set of cursed questions).
These parts can then be ablated, removed.
This does cause “brain damage”, and the more extensive the removal, the more damaged the AI model becomes.
// I really like the brain surgery comparison, it makes it much easier to understand the general concept of de-censoring AI.
// To Study: Decensoring AI, how are the parts identified, how are the parts ablated/removed.
// To Study: Program called Heretic, open-source project that makes the process super simple.
This gives Pewdiepie the flexibility to decide and control the extent and areas of censorship that he wants to retain in his model. To think about where to draw the line, and what kind of AI use is responsible use.
There’s a bazillion other models out there uncensored, so it does not matter too much.
But Pewdiepie drew the line at causing harm to other people, or causing harm to yourself, as that goes against his personal philosophy.
// I like that Pewdiepie has a strong stance on his personal philosophy and avoiding doing harm.
// Creating a small, independent model does give this kind of freedom to exercise one’s personal ethics instead of playing it as safe as possible, unlike the large firms.
// But he isn’t being irresponsible about it.
Teaching the AI Model
Pewdiepie ran GRPO to train his model Ajax, and he found it really fun because it's a more interactive way of teaching the model.
The model will run the same task a set number of times (16). If it solves the task even one time out of the 16 times, that becomes valuable training data.
You reinforce the ability to generate the solution and hope for it to improve the model.
// To Study: GRPO
// Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a memory-efficient reinforcement learning algorithm that eliminates the need for a separate critic model by evaluating multiple outputs within a group to calculate relative advantages
After 4 days of training, he ran out of tasks to fit the criteria, so he had to quickly synthesise more.
There was a back-and-forth process where it first improved, then flatlined, and then it started improving again.
He had to run reinforcement training, then run the decensoring ablation again, and then have to quantise,The capabilities of open models and harnesses point the way forward for users to use uncensored, less restricted intelligence on their own hardware, an important goal in keeping the technology free. and benchmark it to ensure nothing was lost.
Spent 8 weeks going through the dos and don'ts, by doing the don'ts over and over and over.
Small Model Advantages
Pewdiepie originally planned to train a way bigger model, but then he realised no one would be able to use it.
The main idea behind Ajax was to give everyone access to run a local AI, and for that it had to be a small model.
// I like that he is coming from a place of accessibility and thinking of the average use of AI for most people.
Pewdiepie’s napkin maths: OpenAI/Anthropic models are rumoured to be one trillion parameter models, which would take roughly 27 copies of his computer to run one instance of a model, about 150 houses in terms of electricity use.
It makes no sense to poke “that giant beast” to ask it for basic tasks like checking emails.
He really believes strongly in creating small models trained for a specific harness.
Most people use AI for searching, researching, browsing; just saving time going through lots of pieces of information. Getting information quickly to you.
That is where his small model works best.
Important for AI to not replace creativity, to not replace thinking.
A lot of AI problems can be solved by running it on your own.
That is a future that he thinks is exciting, and that’s what he wants to build with Odysseus and Ajax.
He strongly believes that AI should not replace learning new things or thinking for yourself.
Everyone still needs the basic knowledge of different subject matters, and when they get to the point of understanding, that is when they can utilise AI to start accelerating their work and process.
// I agree with all that he said! I think it's well put too!
Other Notes
Ajax is built for Odysseus, his self-hosted AI workspace, as an autonomous, always-on agent and assistant.
The setup is similar to OpenClaw and Nous Research’s Hermes Agent.
Ajax, a fine-tuned Qwen3.5-9B model...
// I wonder why he used Qwen as the basis for Ajax, maybe they're less strict idk how Alibaba compares as a Chinese company vs the western based AI companies that I'm more familiar with?
The video announced the first version, using Alibaba’s model, as a follow-up to his workspace launch in May.
Frontier AI model companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic make sure to hide their reasoning in numerous ways, including encryption and attempted distillation; such a campaign OpenAI recently attributed to actors linked to Moonshot AI is seen as a threat.
To "uncensor" his model, he relied on automatic abliteration through the open-source Heretic, where you discover prompts the model refuses to trace and remove the refusal, preferably without doing “brain damage” by removing too much.
// I just liked the use of the word abliteration here haha
// The term combines "ablation" (surgically removing a part) and "obliteration" (destroying it).
The capabilities of open models and harnesses point the way forward for users to use uncensored, less restricted intelligence on their own hardware, an important goal in keeping the technology free.
Tweets that I Saw
It was all over my X/Twitter feed, which was what initially drew me to watch PewDiePie's video to understand what was going on!
I am disappointed that for everyone's eagerness to comment on his video, there hasn't been much interesting input, praise, or critique on his work.
Too early to tell I suppose.
Everyone's just acting shocked that he's as knowledgeable about AI as he is.
Which isn't very meaningful, even for a tweet, but I'm glad to have been brought awareness about his interesting project!
