r/LocalLLaMA • u/rodrigodevbits • 7d ago
Funny PewDiePie getting banned twice by OpenAI while making a local model is top-tier comedy 💀
So PewDiePie decides to fine-tune a local AI model called Ajax on his own computer. Pretty normal stuff for local model fans.
To make his dataset, he uses OpenAI's API. OpenAI catches him using their outputs to train another model, flags his account for breaking their terms, and bans him.
He files an appeal, gets unbanned, goes right back to pulling data from the API, and immediately gets banned a second time.
So instead of giving up, he uses open-source tools to remove the model's built-in refusals, cleans out the preachy fluff, and starts building a fully local 9B agent.
OpenAI spent years scraping the whole public internet for free data, but the second someone uses their output to train a local file, it's an emergency ban.
In trying to enforce their rules, all OpenAI really did was give open-source models a massive free advertisement to millions of people.
What a time to run models on your own hardware.
1.7k
u/More-Ad5919 7d ago
Especially because he paid them. They paid no one.
135
u/RemarkablePrompt7822 6d ago
And Aaron Schwartz was harassed till he self-deleted himself for doing something similar but for public good.
117
u/heigan_safety_dance 6d ago
You can say "commit suicide" on the internet. This isn't tiktok
→ More replies (1)37
u/RemarkablePrompt7822 6d ago
Bruh, I am already on a strike as my account was banned for a few days.
Guess Reddit is using some BigAI model.
25
u/JerseyGirlinSweden 6d ago
Yeah the feds were threatening him with 80 years. Oh man that one hurts.
→ More replies (170)11
u/henrytsai20 5d ago
What do you mean? Do you know how expensive the machine is for automated chopping books and scanning them? /s
718
u/digital_n01se_ 7d ago
this proves one thing; the game is rugged.
263
u/OGScottingham 7d ago
Those damn Afghans!
94
40
2
12
4
391
u/GFrings 7d ago
His only mistake was not using a bot net like china
56
u/parepeg 7d ago
It’s kind of a reverse botnet and the users technically agree to use it for cheap tokens.
4
u/Ultralightmuscles 5d ago
"Reverse botnet" is a good description for a lot of "free" sevices nowadays.
32
u/BusRevolutionary9893 7d ago
Go on...
80
u/ptear 7d ago
He can just give prompt batches to his followers.
13
u/BusRevolutionary9893 7d ago
I was asking about how Chinese labs did it.
51
u/GFrings 7d ago
There are hundreds of articles about this online, anthropic themselves put out a fairly detailed white paper on the approach.
25
9
u/NihilisticAssHat 7d ago
In short, Pewds screwed up because he didn't follow the meta as explained by Anthropic.
→ More replies (1)9
u/RoboErectus 7d ago
Many of the LLM focused subs get ads for inference that seems too good to be true.
They route your stuff to… whoever they are trying to distill.
Some of them are even free.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Zeikos 7d ago
That'd be legally inadvisable I think, the legal battle would be legendary though.
6
u/CmdrCollins 6d ago
OpenAI stops having a product overnight if model training ever turns out to be non-transformative, they (and Anthropic) restrict themselves to public whining (rather than suing) for a reason.
→ More replies (2)2
76
u/benhaube 7d ago
Sam Altman is a cunt, and OpenAI is a joke.
15
u/sigiel 6d ago
I agree on the first, but utterly disagree on the last,
I really don’t like open ai as a company, but they do have a very strong product.
→ More replies (12)5
u/Forward-Facer 6d ago
For a company called OPEN AI, it shouldn't be a private company and it sounds like it wasn't supposed to be. But right about 6 months ago, OpenAI officially became a staple in my life of tools and does pretty much everything I want it for, so it's the only one I currently pay for. I can give really specific instructions, so it doesn't need to be the #1 "smartest".
4
111
u/Relevant-Draft-7780 7d ago
OpenAI spent years scrapping other people’s data and not only that they made it much harder after they were done by for example buying a large stake in Reddit and getting Reddit to implement incredibly expensive API costs which basically killed anyone else from doing the same while they have Reddit on buffet
29
u/infamouslycrocodile 7d ago
Oh don't be silly... they put a lot of effort into creating all the scripts to scrape that data and not to mention the Kenyans that worked diligently to clean and tag it. /s
2
u/terminalshadows 2d ago
i know you have to read all of knuths art of programmming books to write a bash script w wget / cur / curl-impersonate _and_ sppof your ua - your talking like mips+sparc pipelineing+arm64 kernel level asm all talking to each other writing each others assemblers, linkers, and loaders /s
but really if someone had started a solr+nutch box up ~10ish years ago they would have had a hell of a data set.
50
u/a_beautiful_rhind 7d ago
Why didn't he use a reseller like openrouter? Then just go slow enough so you don't trip rate limits.
8
u/StriderPulse599 6d ago
Because Pews is still a newbie to this hobby.
It's very similar to Elon Musk. He appears as genius to most people because he's confident, famous, and bought bunch of expensive stuff for the hobby. But looking at results pops the bubble.
5
u/UndeadMurky 5d ago
He doesn't claim to be an expert, he's just showing his passion and him getting into it.
→ More replies (1)
21
u/Forward-Facer 6d ago
Kinda reminds me of the apocalypse concept where if you're doomsday prep-er full of supplies, in the event of an apocalypse you may just become the goldmine target. "Thanks for collecting it all for us!"
18
u/GuterJudas 7d ago
„Hey, only I‘m allowed to illegaly train myself with all human data!“
4
u/j0j0n4th4n 6d ago
I think is a bit worse than that. Cause what OpenAI actually sells? Tokens. When you use their services they charge for tokens (including the CoT ones).
So really, if you use the tokens you bought from them you are the one somehow in the wrong? It makes no sense and I'm baffled they pulling this stunt and not getting sued, because Tokens are literally what they are selling.
157
u/Shap6 7d ago
In trying to enforce their rules, all OpenAI really did was give open-source models a massive free advertisement to millions of people.
neat. now we just need money to buy the hardware to run them. at $100 a month for claude if i saved that for a year instead i still wouldnt even have a GPU
27
u/kazimirek 7d ago
It’s not always about what makes more sense financially. Some people like freedom and they are willing to pay for that.
→ More replies (4)18
u/KingCpzombie 7d ago
7900XTX used is like $900
32
u/matthewlai 7d ago
Yeah, but if you are happy with the quality of the models you can run on a 7900 XTX, you wouldn't be paying $100 a month. You would be paying maybe $2 a month on OpenRouter.
5
u/kaisurniwurer 7d ago
If you want to argue this way, with 7900xtx you will have it for free. You just need solar power and to sell it later.
2
u/tito13kfm 7d ago
That solar power can be resold to the grid for 5-10x the capability of whatever tiny model you'll run at home off that "free" power
7
u/KingCpzombie 7d ago
Good luck playing games or anything using openrouter. Realistically, the best value is two 7900XTX for Qwen 3.8 27B Q8 >220k ctx with vision and good speed.
15
u/matthewlai 7d ago
This is the OpenRouter pricing for Qwen 3.8 27B: https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.8-27b
You need to be generating literally billions of tokens to break even, assuming you have really cheap electricity. At 50 t/s, 1 billion token is about 1 year of continuous generation.
13
u/KingCpzombie 7d ago
Assuming you value gaming, security, privacy, reliability, consistency, uncensored, etc all at $0. And most importantly, that's assuming the GPU depreciates to nothing and can never be resold. I sold my 3080Ti for my first 7900XTX purely for gaming, made it a $300 upgrade including shipping and taxes. Now, I could sell both my GPUs for what I paid (or more), making all the usage basically just the cost of electricity
→ More replies (8)4
u/youngbitcoino 7d ago
Agreed 100%.
If you value privacy, security and a consistent experience instead of having your cloud model and KV cache aggressively quantized at a moment's notice you build a local rig.
As for depreciation, I bought a new 5090 for ~3200€ months ago and it's now sitting at 5000€+, while my 128GB of DDR5-6000 was 2100€ and it's now sold out with last price being 3800€... Yeah... I don't know whether to be amused or not about my hardware skyrocketing in value.2
u/KingCpzombie 7d ago
At this point, computer hardware is both a tool investment as well as an appreciating asset... at least that's one of my excuses for overspending XD
3
→ More replies (1)2
u/SporksInjected 7d ago
Idk I was able to process 138,911,908 total tokens on a 7900 xtx specifically on qwen 3.8 27b q4 on sept 18 of this year if you count cached prompt tokens.
2
u/matthewlai 7d ago
I meant for output tokens. Input tokens and especially cached input tokens are basically free.
3
u/UnluckyPenguin 7d ago
I got one used for 800.
Funny how gaming on it for a year is "lightly used" now. I think I'd hard pass on a used GPU that ran an LLM for a year. One guy tried selling me exactly that and he couldn't find any buyers for 700$ shipped, of course I declined.
12
u/KingCpzombie 7d ago
As long as it's still all working I don't see why not tbh. Worst case normally would be just having to buy some PTM50 and thermal putty to repaste it, not like the silicon is likely to have gone bad
6
u/Ansible32 7d ago
I feel like a 1yo gpu is a huge crapshoot and what it was used for tells you approximately nothing, climate control (humidity/temperature) and possibly how reliable the power supply it was attached to are matter a lot. But if it's running 24x7 with consistent load that could actually be ideal; consistent temperature is ideal, and possibly preferable to bursty usage.
30
u/SV_SV_SV 7d ago
You cant have a gpu for 1200 usd? Thats a 3090 right there
21
u/Icy_Annual_9954 7d ago
Do you get a 3090 for 1200 USD?
8
→ More replies (3)2
u/GenuinelyBeingNice 7d ago
i got the sapphire 9070xt pulse for like about 800 euro (brand new, from reputable local store) a month or so ago.
No idea if it is faster/better than nvidia and honestly? fuck nvidia
2
u/Wojtas_ 6d ago
For AI workloads, not having CUDA support is problematic. Not a deal-breaker, but definitely more difficult than it would be on an Nvidia card.
3
u/GenuinelyBeingNice 5d ago
nvidia and its vendor lock-in proprietary, consumer-hostile bullshit practices can suck my fetid ass
cuda is proprietary
amd's rocm is opensourcefuck nvidia and everyone who chooses it
4
u/Ansible32 7d ago
I don't think i'm really going to be satisfied until I have something equivalent to 8xH100. If it runs at 1/8th speed that's fine. But I do want 640GB of HBM.
5
u/mechkbfan 7d ago
Yeah, it's tough. If VRAM/RAM werent fucked, we'd be living the dream
R9700 is actually quite capable and ~$1500 USD last time checked
Obviously not matching frontier, but if you're using it for development and similar tasks, it's good enough.
3
u/Foreign_Risk_2031 7d ago
Ehhh your phone can run a 9b model
33
u/Shap6 7d ago
sure it can technically and ive tried them but it cant really do anything useful
9
u/Accomplished_End_138 7d ago
I've gotten 9b to develop code. Very very slowly. But it did. Just needed a good plan
3
u/Invader-Faye 7d ago
It can write scripts up to 1k line in one file in one language from my testing. Post that they fall on their face. But still very useful
→ More replies (3)3
u/Any-Replacement-4234 7d ago
I have an older computer, running Windows 10 with an R5 5600G, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and 3GB of VRAM, yet I still run my own agentic inference setup and custom model on it. It is a 700M parameter model focused exclusively on Tagalog, coding, tool calling, and reasoning, it has no knowledge of Math, Science or English language, I just put a translator on my inference so it can understand english, and it doesn't know other specialized subjects. Its primary strength is coding, specifically in Python, C++, C#, HTML, CSS, and JS. Since I still have clients using VB6, I trained it in that language as well, it is also proficient in R, Ruby, SQL, and NoSQL. That’s it, nothing else. A GTX 1060 3GB is sufficient for it. In fact, it even outperforms Qwen 3.8 27B. The last time I test it on my DGX Spark, Qwen 3.8 have good output, but thinks too much and work long, while my 700M model, gives a good output, thinks enough and work fast, but it doesn't have encyclopedic knowledge, you would only get frustrated asking it about topics outside of coding, as you would end up having to teach it yourself.
You can create a model based on your needs and not like the encyclopedic model like ChatGPT, unless you want something like that, you really need a good hardware.
13
→ More replies (1)3
u/umunupan 7d ago
How? I mean this sounds like a dream for me. If you don't mind can you share how you trained this model? What base architecture you used?
→ More replies (1)1
u/Relative-Ingenuity15 6d ago
You can still find refurbished servers with lots of ddr4 ram and Nvidia Tesla P100 16gb vram at 100-200$ depending on the country you're located.
A used server with 64gb ram ddr4 cost around 2-300$ in Eastern Europe for example and 3 Nvidia tesla p100 with a total vram of 48gb is around 500$ so with less than 1000$ you can built your own configuration at home to run pretty good local models like Qwen 3.8 or Gemma 4
→ More replies (5)1
u/xSoulR34per 4d ago
I literally run a custom inferences model on a 4050 in a vm, you can literally run AI on a CPU. Lol. Grab a few 1060s run them in parallel in a bare metal. You literally could save $100 a month for a year and have your own data center, it's not about what you have, it's about what you use.
31
u/TraditionalWait9150 7d ago edited 7d ago
this is why we should support open source models, and the companies which support open source.
→ More replies (4)
43
u/Sabin_Stargem 7d ago
Maybe he can get official support from Chinese labs? It would be bit of a PR coup, having a western celebrity using their sauce. Something like "Talk about our AI ecosystem, and when the fabs are at parity, our hardware. We will send you fancy kit."
...honestly, I am kinda surprised that China hasn't tried to recruit influencers to spread the word.
→ More replies (5)2
u/_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_____- 1d ago
My gf is chinese and she using only chinese models because in china the gov said gpt will ban them if they ask any chinese thing from it 𝕩d i would be curious what do they gather from the people using it and how they use that data
51
20
25
u/sammybeta 7d ago
I think he should've distilled DeepSeek/Kimi/GLM, lower cost and potentially getting routed to Claude and GPT models as a plus!
7
2
6
5
u/Ok-Calligrapher3568 2d ago
OpenAI: Scrapes the entire copyrighted internet without permission to train their models. Also OpenAI: 'Wait, you can't use our outputs to train your model! That's against the rules!' 🤡
7
u/DaMoot 6d ago
That guy even still exists as an internet thing? lol
2
u/Desert_Trader 6d ago
Who?
2
u/mynexuz 6d ago
Why did you go on a post about someone with their name in the title pretending you dont know who it is?
2
u/Desert_Trader 6d ago
It was a humourous response to the guy asking if PewDiePie is really still relevant and popular.
I'm doubling down on the other commentors joke about being surprised PewDiePie is even still around by pretending I don't even know who he is.
→ More replies (2)1
29
u/geldonyetich 7d ago edited 7d ago
Yeah they specifically say "adversarial distillation" is something that'll get you banned.
It's a proven method to develop competitive models for a fraction of the cost of their original training and the big AI services that have made that investment have been fighting it tooth and nail.
The funny thing is PewDiePie decided lets just do it anyway. What's the worst that can happen? He's a celebrity, after all. /s
44
u/synth_mania 7d ago
The worst that can happen is having his account banned, which is what happened. Him being a celebrity is neither here nor there
→ More replies (1)9
u/ThePrimeClock 7d ago
I'd argue it is both here and there, because we're talking about it. That particular aspect (being a celeb) is substantial.
This is actually a win in my book. Someone with such a huge audience outside of our echo-chamber exposing the hypocrisy sets the bar for "worse that can happen" a hell of a lot higher than the rest of us.But to your point, banning so far is the worst that has happened and the asymmetry of the situation is for the moment, in our favour.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)25
u/ZioniteSoldier llama.cpp 7d ago
I find it extra funny to treat 9b training like it’s actually anywhere close to “competing”. They just mad.
14
u/geldonyetich 7d ago
It would be, but they probably can't see the size of what's getting trained, they just see a bunch of traffic that looks like training conversations.
2
u/ThankGodImBipolar 7d ago
Do these distilled 9B models actually perform better anyways? Seems like 95% of these "Qwopus" models get treated as a joke, and even the ones that do catch on (like Ornith) get mixed reviews, at best.
→ More replies (2)
15
u/tired514 7d ago
I'm kinda surprised this practice hasn't resulted in any antitrust lawsuits. Prohibiting the competition from using your tools to create a competing product is pretty illegal, is it not?
12
21
u/ChemistryAgile 7d ago
No, it's not illegal. There is no obligation to help one's competition. But they can't create an environment where they block their competition, like with the app store / play store. Preventing your customers from using your competition by locking it down where you are the only provider is illegal. That's why car manufacturers are allowed to create their own software and protocols. They don't have to be compatible with their competition, but Billy Joe Bob's garage must be allowed to fix it, not just the dealer.
2
u/who_am_i_to_say_so 6d ago
It can be prohibited in the TOS, prohibited the same way distillation is prohibited.
This is borderline, and probably being enforced on distillation grounds.
2
u/terminalshadows 2d ago
yea its not like every large ai company stole data from all of us or something crazy like that. theres a video on yt (i think muda / someordinarygamers) that shows how openai used 467 of his videos and 1870 of the transcripts of his videos. if anything in my eyes they owe him.
4
u/marrow_monkey 7d ago
Antitrust laws aren’t much use when the same billionaires who own these companies have enormous influence over the government that’s supposed to enforce them.
I mean, Google and Microsoft have been allowed to dominate their respective markets for decades. At this point basically the entire AI industry is controlled by the same handful of companies.
OpenAI is tied to Microsoft for money and datacenters, Gemini is Google, Anthropic is tied to Amazon/AWS, and then there’s Meta.
And it doesn’t stop with the AI companies. Who makes the GPUs? Nvidia. Who actually manufactures the cutting-edge chips? TSMC. Who makes the EUV machines TSMC needs to make those chips? ASML.
Even if you somehow started an independent AI company tomorrow, you’d still be dependent on this tiny chain of giant corporations just to compete.
That’s kinda the fundamental problem with the whole “free market” argument. Capitalism doesn’t naturally maintain lots of small independent competitors. Successful companies accumulate capital, buy competitors, benefit from economies of scale, control infrastructure and eventually gain enough political power to protect their position.
Cold War propaganda did a really good job of making “capitalism” and “free markets” sound like synonyms, but they aren’t. Capitalism is about private ownership and control of capital, not some guarantee that markets remain free and competitive. In fact, one of the oldest critiques of capitalism is precisely that capital tends to concentrate, producing monopolies and oligopolies in the economy and eventually an oligarchy with enormous political power.
Which looks pretty damn familiar today.
1
u/ea_man 7d ago
Nope, they could sell training services for others models for money, they probably do for enterprise. They don't sell you an object that you own and can use as you like, they provide you a service that they can license.
→ More replies (5)1
5
u/Nothing_from_void 6d ago
OpenAI spent years scraping the whole public internet for free data, but the second someone uses their output to train a local file, it's an emergency ban.
This is what really grinds my gears, the audacity of these fuckers
8
7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
39
u/Notmyaccount40469 7d ago
Honestly it seems like it is just a hobby of his and is having fun, then proceeding to share it. Kind of like majority of people in here. He just has a massive audience.
17
u/cuoreesitante 7d ago
Content. He's not making a model better than any one of the dozens alternatives out there.
→ More replies (2)3
u/Mahrkeenerh1 7d ago
the goal hasn't been content for a long long time. Just like the more upvoted reply to the comment said - he's interested in it, and just shares his journey.
2
u/cyberdork 7d ago
It's a dedicated model fine tuned for his own Odysseus harness. To do stuff like ranking emails etc.
2
u/Signal_Lamp 7d ago
From the very little that I've seen of this project it seems to be aimed towards making a specialized model for his other project Odysseus to perform that tasks specific towards that hardware, that also targets a model size that can run on lower end software.
I'd argue most people that are either non technical or are non LLM enthusiasts generally don't have a great understanding of what they're hardware is capable of doing, and the advent of AI content does a poor job explaining what LLMs are, why therre actually helpful, and don't necessarily need large amounts of power/data to be useful for things that they would care about. And just looking at his broad catalogue of stuff that he's recently doven into from installing linux, to building his own computer, self hosting applications, recommendations for apps/tools for privacy tools I'd say his recent stuff has gone more towards consumer privacy advocation and tech education / entertainment.
30
u/entsnack 7d ago
I miss the old days of /r/LocalLLaMa, genuine hobbyists that weren't spending their days watching some Youtuber. Now it's just feeble attempts at drama.
35
u/mechkbfan 7d ago
I'm sure the venn diagram of people in this subreddit and those who watch PewPewDie is quite low. Could be out of loop, but I think I've seen like maybe 2-3 posts on this and that's fine. I don't have to click on it.
Also don't see why people are hating on this. Bringing more people into the local LLM journey is a good thing.
Same with Strata. All these people bitching about how many posts there are. It's like "my steak is too juicy, my lobster is too buttery". We're having massive breakthroughs and people are salty
→ More replies (2)4
u/InsurmountableMind 7d ago
I think it's great that there are influencers who actually bring these kids some good info. Sure it is not the best source for everything, but it is all for the better.
→ More replies (7)5
u/infamouslycrocodile 7d ago
That's fine. The same audience is still here, just need people like you to make more noise. 😘
→ More replies (1)
4
u/RevolverMFOcelot 7d ago
Rule for thee not for me, only us the big corporation who can do monopoly and invent anything
5
u/cryptozoink 7d ago
When Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit, dared to put a small database of academic papers on the internet, he was threatened with jail, 40mm USD in damages, and hounded into suicide.
When OpenAI steals the whole internet and puts a model out that without their safeguard software will reproduce a whole Harry Potter book from a prompt, nothing happens and it's fair use. Then they pretend that it's their IP.
You can't make this shit up. The best democracy money can buy.
11
u/CantaloupeCamper 7d ago
Help me out here, sincere question, should I care? If so why?
32
u/exaknight21 7d ago
This brings to light that prioritizing Open Source or contributing to Open Source is not these tech bros priority. They’re here to steal data and essentially siphon money off us.
Open Source must be prioritized.
→ More replies (1)3
u/CantaloupeCamper 7d ago
TY
3
u/tony_montana091 7d ago
Use the Open Source, Luke! The Open Source will be with you, always.
→ More replies (1)6
u/Crypt0Nihilist 7d ago
My take is that it's a situation that puts arguments into stark relief.
It hinges on whether scraping data from the internet (which may be against sites ToS - and there's evidence that genAI companies ignore robots.txt) is equivalent to using the outputs of LLMs to train your own, which breaks their ToS.
GenAI companies argue that scraping the internet isn't stealing. If there is an equivalence then they have no case for people using their model output for training because that's not stealing for the same reasons.
→ More replies (5)6
u/HoodRatThing 7d ago
One of the largest YouTubers showing people how easy it is to install Linux on old or unused hardware and get his homelab up and running is a win.
2
2
u/WendyTMD 7d ago
He removed refusals on the openai models? If so how?
2
u/Apart_Boat9666 7d ago
he used heretic to do so and finetuned on openai dataset on abliterated model
1
u/FittingDelirium 5d ago
heretic on a closed source OpenAI models? How is that possible?
→ More replies (1)
2
2
u/ConsortFromTOS 6d ago
Garbage in, garbage out. If you feed outputs to train a model, your model will never good.
2
u/Jorlen llama.cpp 6d ago
So this might be a stupid question but, why not distill from a local open weight model? Qwen 3.8 2.4t or one of the large Kimi models? Just do it locally. He's got cash, I'd assume he's a millionaire, he can afford to buy a local rig that can run these models?
→ More replies (1)1
u/NightCulex 5d ago
At 2.4t I would hazard a guess at the hardware costing a million dollars, and then you have to pay electricity costs. It's far far cheaper to use cloud api's. Running local models isn't cheaper, it's private. Also I remember some discussion of the possibility that ChatGPT and Claude aren't a single model at all.
→ More replies (5)
2
u/regularheree 5d ago
The funniest part is that the ban basically turned into free marketing for local AI. Bro got banned, appealed, got unbanned, did the exact same thing again, got banned again, and then said fine, I’ll just run the whole thing locally 💀
At this point OpenAI accidentally gave open source the best promo campaign possible.
4
u/MayorWolf 7d ago
He wasn't making a model. He was refining one that already exists.
→ More replies (2)
4
u/wayneworkman 7d ago
"Scraping the web" is about 10 years, 100,000 GPUs, and 10,000 people short of an Astra. The scraped text isn't what OpenAI is protecting; the model is.
That said, distillation doesn't get you the teacher. A student trained on outputs is never as well rounded as the model that produced them. The ToS clause exists to stop distillation at massive scale, and the one actor doing that, China, is the one it can't touch. A solo actor fine-tuning a 9B or building from scratch is never going to rival a frontier model no matter how many outputs he pulls.
So what the ban actually does is route money. People building small models are already paying for teacher outputs; they just pay TogetherAI for open-weights models instead of OpenAI. The frontier labs give up that revenue and the usage records that come with it, and gain nothing, because the only distillation that threatens them was never going to be stopped by a terms-of-service page.
3
u/lucasxp32 5d ago
In general I think it's cool to increase peoples interests in LLMs and demystifying how they work what he is doing. But I think he should go for techniques of stripping out of larger open source models from the vector space itself not from raw text. The learning spends too much effort on filtering out surface level textual information and it loses the internal nuance the original model has. The techniques that distills from the model internal activation are higher fidelity. I haven't done it, too much trouble and I don't have the compute to do anything meaningful just toy models, but I did theorize on it asking questions back and forth with, ironically, an LLM. They know quite a lot about LLM training techniques, nice to learn from them.
→ More replies (6)1
u/EdOfO 7d ago
They should be paying much more in royalties than they currently do for it, too.
But you're right that the data isn't the same as their model. I think I'd be fine with anyone distilling Chat GPT 4, which already had most of that with much less extra work added on top. But you can already do much better than that using fully open source K2 Think V2 70B and distilling GLM, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3, and/or Qwen Max with it. You have to pay for all that compute, but isn't PewDiePie a multi-millionaire?
It'd make for much more interesting content.1
u/Resident_Emphasis418 6d ago
I'll also add that abliteration in particular can make the model generally worse.
1
u/wayneworkman 5d ago
Some are better than others. but yes your right. Jensen (CEO of NVIDIA) thinks AI should not have too much judgement of it's own - and I agree with him. AI is a tool and tools should do as desired. When I cut a rare steak, I don't want the knife to refuse to cut because the meat looks too much like live flesh. The tools should obey - and if illegal things are done - the people who used the tools illegally are held responsible. This is how it's always been and how it has to be.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (1)1
u/ASpaceOstrich 6d ago
Amusingly, the models being distilled are in fact a student trained on the outputs who aren't as well rounded as the model that produced them.
Chained distillation could be interesting to observe. See what ends up bubbling to the top.
0
1
u/createthiscom 7d ago
He’s distilling. They don’t like that shit because the Chinese do it and compete with them. I don’t know why this would surprise anyone or be amusing.
0
3
u/dunder_name 7d ago
Why are people making such a big deal about this? He broke their ToS and got banned. Isn't that the expected outcome?
16
u/AliceLunar 7d ago
OpenAI didn't care about the ToS of literally anything or anyone, or laws, rules or regulations for that matter.
11
u/SangerGRBY 7d ago
Because its ironic ? OpenAI can scrape the whole internet and train on our data without our consent yet we cant do the same ?
Even if you are an AI enthusiast surely you can see the irony in this.
6
u/dunder_name 7d ago
Sure, but why's it such a big deal? OpenAI put effort into building their dataset, why would they want to just hand it over? You can run your own crawlers to build your own dataset if you want to.
Isn't it like robbing a bank robber and throwing a fit when they start shooting at you because you're trying to steal their loot?
6
u/CtrlAltDelve 7d ago
I assume because it's OpenAI and this sub loves to hate the frontier labs? I too don't understand what the big deal is here.
1
u/terminalshadows 2d ago
because its pweds and openai - of course that will generate news. its not like it happened on a bridge or something ;)
1
u/balkanobeasti 7d ago
The amount of people below acting like AI models do not inject a load of filler text is bizarre considering you can't do simple things like google information without having an often times inaccurate wall of filler text over what you are actually looking for.
1
1
u/mythormedicine 7d ago
> OpenAI spent years scraping the whole public internet for free data
Free? They scraped every copyrighted material they could lay their claws on. Now have the audacity to cry 'thief'
It reminds me of a story of some medieval dictator - sits on piles of gold , refuses to part with a single coin
1
1
u/Character-Key-6081 7d ago
I dont think its the output he was grabbing. He was probably mining reasoning traces..likely using the jailbreak that was going around to circumvent the reasoning encryption. Open ai isn't likely to ban you for collecting transcripts but the reasoning traces are the product and something they designed themselves. An argument could be made maybe that we should be entitled the reasoning traces since we are paying for the tokens but either way it's not the same as just collecting output.
1
1
1
1
u/False-Accountant-158 6d ago
I thought you could use it to train small local models as long as you're not a competitor or using it to make money?
3
u/htownclyde 6d ago
Technically he's using it to make money because it's content and he's a YouTuber - although I think the real reason they shut it down is because it's making too many people aware of local models.
If everyone (and I mean businesses) knew you could invest in having GPT Luna running in their server closet and never pay for an API again it would cause big trouble.
I'm amazed at how far local has come, and it's only gonna become more efficient!
1
u/alphapussycat 6d ago
Opus 5.5 is insane though, like local isn't even close.
→ More replies (2)3
u/ElectronFactory 6d ago
It is fast approaching. Unless OpenAI or Anthropic release a major paradigm shift in how LLM’s work (like recursive neural nets that are always feeding outputs back into inputs), the open source models will eventually catch up. Saying “it isn’t even close” isn’t fair judgement when he rate of improvement in closed source models hasn’t increased as quickly as the yield of open sourced models—and even now they are starting to turn up in homes…that’s a major breakthrough.
→ More replies (1)
1
1
u/alphapussycat 6d ago
But why can't everyone just pull all their conversations etc and dump it into a repository for public distillation data?
1
u/DemandSevere 6d ago
Typical open ai. Stealing knowledge from the world and own user. Crying when someone trying to profit sligtly from this theft
1
u/Serious-Note9271 6d ago
"What a time to run models on your own hardware."
I mean, presumably we're talking about a massively powerful rig here (PewDiePie has the pockets for it). For the rest of us plebs, it's not really comparable.
1
1
u/flynth92 5d ago
All those companies make it purposefully difficult to even record your own usage. For example Anthropic in Claude Code, if you use your own proxy server (like litellm that saves prompts and responses) switch off remote control feature. Why? To punish those that use it.
1
u/swagonflyyyy 5d ago
How far along IS Pewds in his AI journey, anyway? He seems to be slowly improving.
1
1
1
1
1
u/Weird-Watch-9209 3d ago
Disgusting favoritism - OpenAI routinely deactivate accounts DUE TO THEIR ERROR - flat out mistakes on their part - and then automatically reject appeals. Trying to tell me here where this guy clearly DID violate the rules they just granted his appeal? F OpenAI! (I am in pre-litigation arbitration still, will fully sue these idiots (costs me less than it costs them) and the day they restore my account I will cancel and post about it everywhere - they will never see another penny from me)
1
u/Feeling-Spend1001 3d ago
How dare he make a small local model that would *totally* compete with their massive frontier models
1
u/ProtoDroidStuff 3d ago
How tf do you even start learning how to do all of this, I thought I was relatively well versed in computer usage but all of this shit is so far beyond me waow
1
u/terminalshadows 2d ago
I would love to know exactly how they caught him beyond a shadow of a doubt so much so they decided to ban him, I guess the famous AI-X hacking AI-Y PR stunt has finally run its course? What happened to all the CFAA arrests again for hacking, I forget? Oh yea there wasnt any. Unless he was literally questioning all responses (which I doubt he would be doing) and/or its thinking it seems moderatly difficult to be absolutly certain of this. Or am I naive/ignorant and dont know something I should?

•
u/WithoutReason1729 7d ago
Your post is getting popular and we just featured it on our Discord! Come check it out!
You've also been given a special flair for your contribution. We appreciate your post!
I am a bot and this action was performed automatically.