OpenAI banned PewDiePie twice while he was secretly building his own 'uncensored' AI
PewDiePie has revealed the price he paid in his bid to launch his own AI platform that’s free to users.
Felix 'PewDiePie' Kjellberg, was once the king of YouTube back in the 2010s, when he first started a gaming reaction video channel.
It was even the most subscribed channel for years before he took a step back to focus on family life in Japan.
But now, he’s unveiled a tech project that saw him create an open-source tech custom-built AI chatbot.
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The fully self-hosted AI interface runs entirely on his own PC, and is powered by a10-GPU setup was revealed on October 31 last year.
Known as Ajax, his ‘uncensored AI model’ has allegedly led to him being banned by OpenAI twice during the process of creating it.
Ajax is built for Odysseus, his self-hosted AI workspace, which is always running.
Instead of creating his AI from scratch, he previously explained that he used his computer to self-host existing open-source AI models, including running OpenAI's open-source GPT-OSS 120B model, which has approximately120 billion parameters.
He also created a 'council' of AI agents to vote on the best answer to his queries.
Revealing what appears to be an OpenAI email, PewDiePie explained that one ban was due to ‘distillation’, which is the act of using one model to train another.
In response, the YouTuber claimed he wanted to ‘distill just a little bit’ so he could improve his model.
But after his account was reinstated, he apparently received a second ban after he ran the model again ‘to create my seed data.’
He asked viewers: “How did they even know?”
“They worked hard stealing all of our data to make their AI machines,” he added.
However, he seems to have come up with a way around this, and asked followers to donate their training data instead of taking it from Odysseus users.
He said he also had two more days planned where he would conduct reinforcement learning before rerunning the decensoring step and more, noting: “I can’t wait to release the next version of Ajax and Odysseus.”
Previously, PewDiePie revealed his choice to make a major change to how he interacts with YouTube, specifically, disabling his Shorts.
"Next thing I did was disable Shorts, I like YouTube but I hate how Shorts is everywhere, I can't escape it," he explains.
He advised to start unfollowing everyone on social media and getting their own DNS blocker to prevent ads from popping up on their device.
"I think you owe it to yourself to take some time today and start building your tech fence," the YouTuber said. "These tech companies don't care about you, so you've got to care about yourself.
"The cheat code is building some friction and filtering out the noise, that's your defense and your cure."
It's clear that while PewDiePie has decidedly come away from YouTube and video formatting, he's still very much present in the tech space.
UNILAD Tech reached out to OpenAI for comment.