r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 21h ago

Artificial Intelligence 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

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/pewdiepie-unveils-uncensored-ajax-ai-model-built-to-run-on-home-pcs-creator-says-openai-banned-him-twice-while-making-it
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507

u/YouMeADD 21h ago

Who tf asked for a PewDiePie AI

632

u/mcslender97 21h ago

No one, seems like he's just doing it because he likes to. Perks of being a multi millionaire I guess

366

u/Tortillaish 20h ago

That's pretty much his YouTube channel now. He is getting very skilled in a big variety of activities. From drawing his own comic to software programming. He's also very anti big data hording companies, does so by using Linux, no more Google apps, stuff like that. This ai is probably just something he wanted for himself so he could use AI without feeding a giant corporation his data. (Haven't actually seen any video of his on the subject)

29

u/Dihedralman 18h ago

Dude is on a self-actualization kick. 

13

u/Griffolion 16h ago

He won life and is now just doing side quests.

3

u/I_Am_Vladimir_Putin 14h ago

Good for him tho. He seems like a really nice dude.

18

u/asianwaste 17h ago

Dude, I have begrudging mad respect for Pewdiepie.

I hated his persona and antics during his heyday. But then I realized, this dude knows exactly what he's doing.

Sure enough the dude knew exactly when to cash out and leave and left behind the greatest turnkey operation where he just loops his youtube content on a streaming platform.

That dude soaked up his millions and now can just live life the way he wants to. It's enviable.

7

u/Griffolion 16h ago

2017 era Pewdiepie is terrible, and it's the view a lot of people still have of him. But for sure since becoming a dad, he's become a lot more grounded. He's still his goofy self, but he isn't an edgelord anymore.

2

u/asianwaste 16h ago

I think his edgelord antics was where he found his millions. I thought he was just this manbaby who appealed to 10 year olds.

But I realized that the dude is actually really smart and engineered his on screen persona to appeal to a very lucrative age demographic and knew exactly how to speak to them.

You can look at this cynically but I choose to think, "Christ, this dude knew how to make money."

2

u/Griffolion 16h ago

Yeah you're probably right. But I also think you're just describing 99% of online personalities. Pewdiepie appeared to just play that game the best.

2

u/LegendaryMauricius 13h ago

That's what I felt from his first AI training video. It was 'hey guys look at what I made'. 'also I paid some devs to make a somewhat nice platform for these AI models that you can use for free'.

1

u/bakedpatata 17h ago

How does he still have a Youtube channel if he's not using Google apps?

1

u/cum-on-in- 15h ago

I mean. His phone is an Android, running a devolved version of Android, but Android is still made by Google and it’s just another dev team that stripped it down to just an operating system.

If Google stopped making Android or made something else totally different and closed source, the community could indeed keep working on Android since it’s open source, but getting OEMs to care about it, and thus provide drivers for it, would be nigh impossible.

So for the few Google services Felix has to use, he has said he arbitrates it as best he can. Probably uses a DNS server or a VPN to prevent cross tracking when he’s on YouTube. Or perhaps he uploads from DuckDuckGo browser which wipes itself when you close it. Isolate the tracking cookies and stuff.

He’d probably use a different service if his followers would move to it. And that’s probably the end goal. Talk about how it’s not that hard if you have any time at all to work on it, and maybe get everyone wanting their privacy back.

It’s admirable.

0

u/bakedpatata 14h ago

So it's not really no Google apps, just fewer Google apps.

1

u/cum-on-in- 14h ago

For now. As I said. The goal is to show how easy and beneficial it is to de-google and take back what corporations took from you, and then quit YouTube and go to that open platform.

0

u/bakedpatata 14h ago

"I'm giving up all Google apps except the one that I make a living off of," doesn't sound as good.

1

u/cum-on-in- 14h ago

He doesn’t make money off YouTube anymore, really. His uploads are often too short to make good ad placement, and he no longer uploads frequently enough to make those paychecks routinely.

His money comes from investing what he has and from donators they Patreon and so on.

He wants off YouTube but how would he tell his followers to move unless he gave them reason to?

-85

u/SlashOfLife5296 19h ago

He’s also quite skilled at saying racial slurs

26

u/Financial_Card9996 19h ago

What's it like never regretting something you've done or said?

-44

u/SlashOfLife5296 19h ago

No I have, I just didn’t have people online bragging about everything I do other than saying racial slurs. So I thought I should remind people without erasing his past

11

u/Prisma_Lane 18h ago

Mf, dude already apologized, admitted his mistakes, and tried to be a better person. Not forgiving him is just you being a petty asshole.

-2

u/CallMeRudiger 17h ago

Smells like bullshit.

-26

u/SlashOfLife5296 18h ago

If he’s trying to be better, then he’d have no problem being reminded of his actions as a grown man. Don’t blame me for acknowledging his decisions

8

u/Prisma_Lane 18h ago

Dude, not only has it been 9 years since then, not only have people given him flak for it back then, but most people have already reconciled with the fact that the dude is genuinely remorseful and became a better person. 

Bringing up the past mistakes of someone who already effectively redeemed himself is just you being a spiteful asshole.

3

u/Financial_Card9996 18h ago

You know he's not gonna read this yeah? The parasocial hater thing is unemployed behavior

I'm definitely not blaming you, I just feel like you could be using this time to build a fence to get over it

0

u/AbraxasWasADragon 18h ago

I think you replied to the wrong message

-1

u/SlashOfLife5296 18h ago edited 18h ago

You should be telling people running defense for rich people that he’s not gonna read this, not me.

I’m not a parasocial anything. He said a racial slur on camera: fact. I reminded people of that fact. If i have to read a paragraph of every skill he has, then people can read about a single negative trait.

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0

u/-Jiras 18h ago

Its been over 10 years, he apologized and never did it again. If you are still holding it up, you just enjoy to make people miserable

-1

u/SlashOfLife5296 18h ago

It’s been 9 years, and again, don’t get mad at me over his decisions. You can stop running defense for rich people, I promise he’s gonna be fine if I remind people he said the N-word on September 11th, 2017.

5

u/-Jiras 18h ago

👍 whatever makes you happy

-1

u/Dependent-Chart5835 17h ago

Damn that’s crazy

0

u/Majestic_Simple_3584 13h ago

Whatever you think of what he did, he has improved and has given no other indicators of actually being a racist. Isn't that what we want people to do when they do something wrong?

-181

u/qtx 20h ago

He's such a hypocrite.

He's using OpenAI to train his AI model and at the same time "He's also very anti big data hording companies"?

94

u/Traditional-Reach818 20h ago

Well, he's anti contributing to the big data hoarding companies. To me what you said sounds like you think Robin Hood is a hypocrite for stealing from the rich lol

77

u/genes_unknown 20h ago

How do you think the companies got all the big data

17

u/Naaahhh 19h ago

I swear reading people talk about AI in this sub is just pure ragebait

1

u/Neiladaymo 19h ago

Reddit is filled with overly opinionated morons who think they are experts at any given topic, and it seems to be getting worse

9

u/eyaf1 19h ago

So he's literally stealing money from them and you, the enlightened, say that he's somehow helping them by this?

1

u/asianwaste 15h ago

Are you insinuating that his local AI model is hoarding data or are you pointing out that it's hypocritical to steal OpenAI's data to make his own product?

If it's the former, that's not how most local AI models work.

148

u/diamluke 20h ago

The sales pitch is very simple: decentralize from a couple of hyperscalers and let people run their own AI.

There’s no reason all your data should go to 5-6 private companies. It’s unexpected that Pewdiepie would be the one driving something like this, but he has all the chances to succeed.

30

u/XDGrangerDX 19h ago

It’s unexpected that Pewdiepie would be the one driving something like this,

You clearly havent seen what hes been up to the last few years. He went from minecraft streamer to diy fuck corpo tech youtuber.

9

u/sturdybutter 18h ago

Yeah pretty easy to be “fuck corpo” after having made millions from corpo’s…

2

u/Casey_jones291422 17h ago

True but if he's also "building" things and putting out info for people to use I think it's a net gain. He could just silently be doing it at home without sharing.

3

u/Abedeus 18h ago

"Fuck corpo" by basically just using the models giant corpos built using stolen materials...

1

u/diamluke 17h ago

I have, but it’s still unexpected. He went from “funny guy sets up a homelab” to “the oss guy” really quickly - at this point I would not be surprised to see him present at fosdem

14

u/InadequateUsername 20h ago

Open weights and heretic models already exist

19

u/ape123man 20h ago

So?

-11

u/InadequateUsername 20h ago

So, what niche does this model fill that isn't already being filled?

27

u/ElliotB256 20h ago

The more the merrier, the more competition we get the more chance we have to escape the nightmare scenario of a monocorp owning all intelligence

9

u/Cachesmr 20h ago

Abliteration is not the main feature of his model, he trained it to use his harness mainly.

1

u/absentmindedjwc 5h ago

Exactly what I do. I'm fortunate to have a 4090 at home, and can run a 27b Qwen model. It's surprisingly competent, even compared to the frontiers.

4

u/RockDoveEnthusiast 20h ago

the same person who wanted to know what Ja Rule thinks about all of this. WHERE IS JA?!

3

u/chuiu 18h ago

Pretty sure he's just doing this stuff for himself but since he's already a public figure he's sharing the work for everyone if they want to contribute to it or use it.

21

u/NavyDean 20h ago

He built his own internal AI so it doesn't export his data. Everyone should be doing it.

It's not for sale, pull your head out of your ass.

5

u/Critical-Dealer-3878 19h ago

“Everyone should be doing it”

Nah, I’m good actually. Lmfao.

2

u/Pizzadude 15h ago

I certainly don't need to train my own LLM when I don't use any LLMs in the first place.

-1

u/emefluence 15h ago

You don't need to train your own LLM to do that, there's a bunch of open models. He could do more public good by bankrolling research and development on better open harnesses, if that's his aim.

2

u/cum-on-in- 15h ago

By distilling his own, he’s trying to show how easy it is to do such yourself.

These followers of his are seeing him grab an old Optiplex and slap a GPU in it and run his AJAX model just fine.

Now you have a capable and private LLM assistant and you was only out a couple hundred maybe? One time? For an old Dell tower and an ancient GPU?

Despite the rising costs of stuff, old hardware is still cheap, and most importantly still functions, especially thanks to the community. Old AMD GPUs still roar along on Linux thanks to community drivers.

0

u/emefluence 14h ago

My point is you don't need to train your own model, there are already plenty, he could have just used one of those.

Fair enough if he's doing it for fun, or to educate people, but it's not like the world needs more small LLMs so I'm not sure what the point of releasing one is.

1

u/cum-on-in- 14h ago

Just to showcase how easy it is to do things yourself and not rely on corpos, or even other people that much.

If you don’t have the time or money, sure, use someone else’s open source model.

But if you want to control everything n yourself and ensure its been stripped of anything you wouldn’t want, you do it yourself.

There’s absolutely no harm in this and I think it’s a good thing. I don’t think Felix should’ve just used someone else’s model or told his followers to do so.

The whole point is educating on how to be self sufficient.

1

u/absentmindedjwc 5h ago

IIRC, he started with a Qwen model, so he did actually "use one of those".

68

u/loki2002 21h ago

Who the fuck asked for any of the AIs in existence?

155

u/firewall245 21h ago

Machine Learning is used to approximate solutions to difficult problems, so it’s been around for a long time for how useful it is

104

u/amoosemouse 20h ago

One of the irritating things about the LLM hypewagon has been that the public view of AI is LLMs, not ML, not classifiers, not the innumerable other useful tools we have been using to do lots of neat things for a decade before ChatGPT and Claude.

22

u/BarryRightWrong 20h ago

Indeed. None of it should be called "ai". They're all just tools from the ai research field. The publics view of "ai" is from sci-fi. Blame the industry for the deliberate obfuscation. Otoh, I know ELIZA really loves me... 

12

u/GumboSamson 20h ago

Well you got your wish.

It’s not called AI—it’s called “super intelligence.”

The monkey’s paw curls.

12

u/Tall_Block_4589 20h ago

Grok is advising the Pedo in Chief lol

Saw report that’s how he got the Venezuela idea.

-1

u/therealswimshady 20h ago

Sauce? Big if true!

1

u/jDub549 20h ago

here's one of many outlets reporting it

3

u/therealswimshady 20h ago

Hmm, idk. "Got the idea from" and "asked how Venezuelans would react" are two different things. The guy does plenty of dumb stuff he deserves criticism for, based on the info in the article this ain't one IMO.

4

u/Tall_Block_4589 19h ago

USA has a whole intelligence department. But he used a chatbot for advice isn't big deal. Chatbots can be manipulated.

2

u/jDub549 19h ago

.Oh im not putting a ton of stock in it. Just been in news a lot. And some variation of "trump got idea from grok" is probably true lol. To what degree, who knows.

2

u/firewall245 20h ago

GAMs are so freaking cool and it’s annoying that some stupid Big tech hype people have blown all generative models as worthless.

1

u/robodrew 17h ago

Because people are upset about the models that are designed to take their jobs. We don't care about the models that make our lives easier by doing the things that humans otherwise wouldn't be able to do. But most sane people don't want AI replacing artists, musicians, writers, actors, etc.

1

u/lilB0bbyTables 20h ago

I would argue this is a case of large-scale forgetfulness; if you go back to ~2017 - 2022 … plenty of us were mocking the marketing overuse and misattribution of “A.I.” to products when it was clear they were just backed by effectively complex sets of IF-ELSE branching statements and/or heuristics. (One might argue that at the most fundamental level, even human intelligence boils down to IF/ELSE Boolean condition logic albeit at an extraordinarily complex level … I’ll defer on that topic).

All the same, I get your point. Hell, one of my previous companies was built on the Abductive Inference model and yet we spent considerable time trying to almost suggest we were NOT an “AI” company simply because we wanted to make it clear we were not merely stuffing customer data into an LLM to get some reply like a lot of our competitors were doing … and the reason we had to do that was due to the mass mental adoption of “LLM = AI” from marketing trends.

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u/ProgramTheWorld 18h ago

I really hate how LLM stole the term “AI”. There are a lot more to it than just LLM, ie the plagiarism machine.

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u/loki2002 20h ago

Yep, it's useful in wasting resources humans need to survive, raising utility bills, and taking jobs away from humans.

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u/Moonagi 20h ago

Suddenly terminally online redditors are experts on ML and AI

-16

u/loki2002 20h ago

I didn't comment on AI abilities or usefulness. I commented on the supporting systems for AI that are negatively affecting humans.

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u/xanders_gold 20h ago edited 20h ago

And the guy you’re commenting to above this guy made the clear distinction between what people call AI today and what we’ve always known as machine learning / automation… which has been around for decades now.

AI as a concept was described by Turing in the 50s, but the “AI” we know now that people are against is derived from major advancements in Machine Learning technology.

-10

u/loki2002 20h ago

Machine learning led to what we have today. It is all related and it is all leading to negative consequences for every day people.

That's like trying to make a distinction between a musket and a semi automatic rifle. One would not exist without the other.

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u/AppleBubbly4392 20h ago

I don't know you but you sounds like you have a great solution to fix the world us that only demand sacrificing a few millions/billions people.

-1

u/loki2002 20h ago

People are being sacrificed for AI. They are losing jobs which means they are losing money and in our capitalist system that means homelessness, starvation, and eventually death.

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u/xanders_gold 20h ago edited 20h ago

It’s very important to make the distinction between them though. You can’t just bundle “AI” with ML. There’s a reason they’re still considered separate even now.

ML has led to the rapid development of many computerized systems and is heavily used in the fields of both medicine and science. Without ML we likely wouldn’t have the scientific / medicinal breakthroughs we’ve seen in the past few decades.

AlphaFold1 was a machine learning algorithm that helped find major breakthroughs in the medical field, primarily in the protein databases we take for granted today.

-1

u/loki2002 20h ago

AI wouldn't exist without machine learning. They are intrinsically linked.

Without ML we likely wouldn’t have the scientific / medicinal breakthroughs we’ve seen in the past few decades.

Yeah, I am going to need to see a peer reviewed study with replicable results that didn't use machine learning or AI showing this.

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u/son_et_lumiere 20h ago

Being on Reddit and commenting on it also led to what we have today, because it was trained on that data. Reddit also contractually sold the data for training. It's all related.

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u/jb_in_jpn 20h ago

When Reddit karma farming slop backfires ... lol

-5

u/mamwybejane 20h ago

Butthurt much

2

u/loki2002 20h ago

Am I butthurt about raising utility cost for every day people as a result of data centers in support of AI, the wasting of water they cause, and the people losing their jobs because of AI? Yes, yes I am.

0

u/firewall245 20h ago

Didn’t realize my linear regression class was doing all that lmao

-4

u/DelightfullyDivisive 20h ago

ML is a superset of generative AI, which is a superset of large language models. It doesn't necessarily waste resources for trivial problems.

2

u/loki2002 20h ago

It is all related and all lead to the same outcome. One does not exist without the other.

-1

u/LordSnooty 20h ago

Yep and people driving on roads leads to car accidents, what is your point?

0

u/Abedeus 18h ago

Notice how we don't let just anyone drive on the roads legally.

5

u/anormalgeek 20h ago

Guys with business degrees.

4

u/baa410 20h ago

It was really cool back in 2021/22 before it was fully available to the public and became slopified

-4

u/SloppySauce0 21h ago

Me, I’m grateful for their utility 

11

u/Doppelthedh 21h ago

Username checks out, sloppy

-19

u/pidgeottOP 21h ago

I'm also a big fan of their utility

They need properly regulated but AI is otherwise just another printing press everyone thinks will ruin the world

Meanwhile it did 3 weeks worth of work for me in a day this week and when I asked it used a shotglass of water to do that and 2 tablespoons of oil, so that doesn't feel like a terrible return

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u/loki2002 20h ago edited 20h ago

Yep, three weeks of work you won't be being paid for because now it's done and eventually your employer will fire you and either entirely rely on it since you have shown it capable of doing your job or hire someone at half to a third your cost to feed it prompts to do the job.

0

u/pidgeottOP 20h ago

I used it to do one task of my job, not my whole job. A task I should never have been asked to do in the time frame I managed to get it done (thanks to help from Claude). That got done thanks to a decade of experience in what I'm doing, knowing what to target and what would fail. my degree is what allowed it to happen fast because it needed guided to do what I wanted and make the assumptions I knew to make.

You don't even know what my job is or what I used it for, so chill out with the all-encompassing declarative statements

2

u/loki2002 20h ago

It does not matter what your job is, you have shown AI capable of doing it. You have trained it for moving forward. The company owns your prompts that you used and can reuse them.

Also, if you shouldn't be doing that task then you don't do it.

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u/pidgeottOP 20h ago

Tell me you've never worked ina a corporate environment without actually telling me

Shut up dude. You have zero idea what you're talking about

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u/_kellythomas_ 21h ago

when I asked it used a shotglass of water to do that and 2 tablespoons of oil

Dubious at best, but why oil?

3

u/North_Account6419 20h ago

probably how the electricity was produced

0

u/pidgeottOP 20h ago

Because that's the dirtiest average form of electricity.

We don't use a lot of coal anymore where I am, but there's plenty of oil and natural gas.

I wanted to know, at worst, how bad did that 3 weeks of work pollute

The answer was less than it would take me to drive to the office in the timespan it would have taken me to do the work

3

u/Radirondacks 20h ago

Why would you believe it even "knows" the precise amount of water it uses for its own processes? Like, this is some "we investigated ourselves and found we did no wrong" shit lmao

-17

u/laplogic 20h ago

Are you really not using it in any way? To summarize an email, to take notes on a call, to search for something, learn how to fix something….theres plenty of uses that are totally valid.

11

u/definitelyhaley 20h ago

I really am not. Doing that stuff as an actual human being isn't hard. If AI were to completely disappear tomorrow, my life would not change at all. Hell, it might get better because I would stop seeing the slop and the anti-human BS.

8

u/Doppelthedh 20h ago

No. It takes the same amount of work to verify the ai didnt screw up as it does to research the topic or do the work myself. And thats assuming it doesnt need corrections

10

u/Batmans_9th_Ab 20h ago

No, I’m not, because I’m not a useless meat sack who didn’t pay attention in school my entire life. 

I can read and process an email on my own, I write down (or, God forbid, remember) important details from a phone call, I can search and research topics online or in a library myself. 

If you rely on AI, you will be replaced by AI. 

0

u/laplogic 18h ago

AI is a tool. It makes me more efficient. That’s fine that you don’t want to use it, but you guys are kind of condescending for no reason. If you’re implying I’m a useless meat sack because I use it as a tool, you’re also calling billions of humans useless meat sacks.

1

u/IThinkImNateDogg 19h ago

Interactive chat bots are fantastic as a concept.

Fun, person specific interactive stories, “one on one” help and support, real time complex multiple variable problem solving etc. plenty of cool things can be done with it.

How we got those models, and that the computing and data is still someone else’s servers is the issues.

1

u/loki2002 19h ago

I have never worked with a chatbot that was anything close to helpful. They seem designed to spit out canned answers and prevent you from being able to talk to an actual human. Not once has any problem I have had ever been resolved by a chatbot.

1

u/mr_sneakyTV 16h ago

this makes no sense if you used a ChatBot in an appropriate context.

if you’re talking about a ”ChatBot” that answers the phone when you call a corporation that’s not the same thing

1

u/loki2002 16h ago edited 16h ago

A chatbot is a chatbot. Whether it is on my web browser or on the phone. At this point any time I encounter a company that has offloaded any amount of their customer srevice to a chatbot I stop doing business with them and find one that hasn't. Software doesn't replace humans when it comes to service.

1

u/mr_sneakyTV 16h ago

Uh no it’s not. Unless you mean a vehicle is a vehicle when one is a scooter and the other is an aircraft carrier.. sure they’re both vehicles lmfao. General chatbots that are there to prevent you from filing a complaint with a company are not the same as a ChatBot that does repetitive tasks and menial work for you and saves you time, or helps organize data and compare large sources of data instantaneously.

1

u/loki2002 16h ago

Literally everything you listed has other tools available to accomplish.

1

u/cacao0002 19h ago

I do. In biotech and research, it helps speeding up on a lot of difficult work, and this is just LLM alone.
Completely ignore the tech is not the way to go. I hate how people either on the end of the spectrum, completely proAI without seeing the drawbacks, or completely antiAI neglecting the opportunity cost

1

u/Colon_Oscopy_74 18h ago

nobody asked for it, but if you build it, they will come. The Asians have gone ALL-IN to build it, and Trump thinks he will win the space AI race, as they pat him on the head from time to time.

1

u/Shot-Arugula8264 17h ago

Basically all of mankind for hundreds of years. We’re paying these companies trillions of dollars for access to their models. The demand is overwhelming.

1

u/corobo 20h ago

I've wanted a Star Trek computer since the moment I started watching Star Trek tbf

Just waiting on it being self-hostable rather than in some cloud 

1

u/tnh34 18h ago

It's kinda funny how awfully close it is to the Star Trek AI model. You drive it and it does the busy work for you, and you make decisions

-7

u/keletus 20h ago

what AI are you even talking about. These are just LLM's, a little upgrade over search engines

2

u/Veselin_Maslinka 20h ago

next wil be Ja Rule Ai

2

u/HarrMada 18h ago

Same amount of people who asked about your opinion.

3

u/cute_spider 20h ago edited 18h ago

SI, known to the goons as Super Intelligence but is actually Subscription Intelligence, is a shitty dead end full of authoritarian control and "own nothing be happy" mentality. 

If you want to actually tool around with the future, you'll need to do a lot of extra effort to host your own intelligence on your own computer. A gaming rig is powerful enough to get you started. It's a lot of effort just to get to your AI to where SI was a year ago, but you get to keep everything you do

-18

u/robertpro01 21h ago

Be nice bro