PewDiePie unveils ‘uncensored’ Ajax AI model built to run on home PCs — creator says OpenAI banned him twice over model distillation used to build his product - Canada News Beep

PewDiePie, the popular YouTuber, has unveiled Ajax, his “uncensored AI model” built to run at home, and says in a new video that OpenAI banned him twice while he was making it. According to the OpenAI email he shows, one ban was explicitly for “distillation,” the practice of using one model’s outputs or reasoning to train another. Ajax is built for Odysseus, his self-hosted AI workspace, as an autonomous, always-on agent and assistant.

I seriously should NOT be dropping this. – YouTube

Watch On

The setup is similar to OpenClaw and Nous Research’s Hermes Agent. Ajax, a fine-tuned Qwen3.5-9B model, powers the workspace to handle “daily tasks from search to browse the web to email to your calendar,” all “completely privately,” according to its Ajax page. The page says its refusal has been removed for a “freer, less restricted AI experience” and asks users to use it responsibly. The video announced the first version, using Alibaba’s model, as a follow-up to his workspace launch in May.

The Odysseus self-hosted AI workspace in a dark theme, with a sidebar of tools beside an empty chat box

(Image credit: odysseus-dev/GitHub)

You may like

The creator “strongly believe[s]” in small models trained “for a specific harness,” and suggested them as an alternative to the “one trillion parameter” models, referring to rumored frontier sizes. “I think it makes no sense to poke that giant beast” just for basic tasks, he said. His interest remains in research and providing a usable model, which also means smaller. He followed up with a plea for fans to donate training data as a superior alternative to collecting it directly from Odysseus users, though he says no one submitted any.

benchmarking. “I can’t wait to release the next version of Ajax and Odysseus,” he added, noting that Odysseus has “gotten a huge update as well.” The naming convention makes sense, as Ajax was Odysseus’ rival in the classic myth, although he jokingly states it’s named after the cleaning product. 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.

PewDiePie unveils ‘uncensored’ Ajax AI model built to run on home PCs — creator says OpenAI banned him twice over model distillation used to build his product

Tags: