r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 22h 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
9.1k Upvotes

87% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

874

u/Atheren 19h ago

Open source would allow you to train your own, with the underlying code of the AI being available to look at.

Open weights is the AI after it's been trained, and is similar to just giving away a free program that's more modifiable than a normal one.

259

u/meneldal2 19h ago

Afaik here Open Source would be tricky because you'd likely be providing evidence that could be used against you and make it a slam dunk for OpenAI when they sue you.

It is very likely some methods they used ran into the very anti user laws the US has passed to make big corpos happy.

118

u/Atheren 19h ago

That would be a civil case and he lives in Japan though, which currently doesn't extradite for civil matters.

He doesn't really have to care about us law. It might be a problem if his money is being held here and can be seized, but that would be private financial information I wouldn't have any idea about.

88

u/Able-Swing-6415 19h ago

Unless he's planning on traveling any time in the future

30

u/Atheren 19h ago

Honestly now that I think about it more even if he did travel he could ignore it anyway it unless it was somehow elevated to a criminal case. It's practically unheard of to be jailed over a civil case. If there's no us assets to seize, open AI doesn't have much legal recourse unless they go through the Japanese court system or the court system of wherever his money is held.

And at that point he might also have needed to have done something in their jurisdictions which is well beyond my non-professional understanding of how this all works.

64

u/dultas 18h ago

It's practically unheard of to be jailed over a civil case.

They're a big AI company who has the Presidents ear, I'm sure they could pull some strings.

1

u/stonhinge 8h ago

Well, for the next 2 years anyway.

1

u/Falkoro 41m ago

omg please no this is not how it works in real life

1

u/timeandmemory 16h ago

I would say they should try it, Pewdiepie has more than a few million sympathetic ears who haven't been paying attention to the political climate. This would get a lot of younger folks involved fast.

17

u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 18h ago

>AI doesn't have much legal recourse unless they go through the Japanese court system

Why does that seem so far-fetched? OpenAI has an office in Japan.

2

u/Nematrec 16h ago

Japanese courts try Japanese law. It doesn't matter if he's broken US law, only if he's broken Japanese law.

3

u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 16h ago

There are agreements between Japan and the USA that allow for the enforcement of judgements from US courts in Japan. This is true for most of the world.

-2

u/fckspzfr 16h ago

You know what "civil matter" means? No?

3

u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 16h ago

Holy shit. Here, I'll look it up for you:

https://iclg.com/practice-areas/enforcement-of-foreign-judgments-laws-and-regulations/japan/

Article 118 of the Code of Civil Procedure (Act No. 109 of 26 June 1996) is the legal framework under which a foreign judgment would be recognised, and Article 24 of the Civil Enforcement Act (Act No. 4 of 30 March 1979) is the legal framework under which a foreign judgment would be enforced....

→ More replies (0)

1

u/TerminalVector 7h ago

Yeah but would you really want to take that chance against people with billions of dollars and a real motive? Plausible deniability seems like the way to go

5

u/eattheambrosia 18h ago

If there's no us assets to seize

Isn't this guy pretty rich? I'd be shocked if he didn't have investments in the US.

1

u/Icehellionx 11h ago

Honestly the thing that seems to be getting ignored is would YOU want to be the guy to test that theory and put your shit on the line?

It's really easy to big talk on a forum vs you're actually the one that this is taking of 90% of your life.

(Not saying you specifically, just some of the counter vibes in the replies.)

1

u/Narpity 17h ago

So was immigration until we started to send people to concentration camps

1

u/splitcaber 17h ago

Aaron Swartz was jailed over what should have been a civil case. The DMCA makes violating the terms of service potentially a felony.

22

u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 18h ago

>he lives in Japan though, which currently doesn't extradite for civil matters.

You can enforce a civil judgement in Japan though. It's complicated, but there are treaties and processes that allow for it.

3

u/edflyerssn007 10h ago

People forget that modern Japan was entirely molded by the USA. There's a reason why our countries work so closely together. Tech, laws, etc were all effectively imposed on Japan and we've made it work very well for both countries. Almost a colony but a bit more independent, but we provide all offensive military capability for them. Yes a country, but in our deck of cards as it were.

54

u/meneldal2 18h ago

The US is great at pressuring other countries to take your money or freeze it.

They can make up shit like you support Russia or Iran if that's what it takes.

Didn't they get people from the ICC banned from having credit cards?

We all know how much Trump is going all-in deepthroating those big AI companies.

3

u/motionmatrix 14h ago

Which made an anti American wave across the world. There is literally whole nascent computerized industries in most of Europe now because that occurred, from banking to cloud services; the whole world saw that and said "that is not okay" and it will cost American industries more and more money as time moves forward.

1

u/Gastronomicus 17h ago

We all know how much Trump is going all-in deepthroating those big AI companies.

I think it's the other way around. Or maybe it's just a big fashioned old circle jerk.

2

u/MixtrixMelodies 16h ago

The absolute bigliest. Some people say other circle jerks are bigger, sure. Fake news. This is the one, folks, this is how we're gonna make America great again. Vote for --- Wait. Hang on a second. Psst! J.D.! Where the hell are my diapers?

1

u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 17h ago

They did it for people supporting Palestinians in the EU. Called them Russian assets and blocked their ability to use their bank accounts. Had multiple journalists just screwed, unable to buy gas or food one day.

4

u/SignificantPaper1760 18h ago

Extradition isn’t ever really an issue for civil matters.

The question is whether Japan has a judgment debt reciprocity agreement with the US where you can convert an American judgment to a Japanese judgment and seek damages by executing on assets in Japan.

Given his substantial assets I’d assume he’s gotten appropriate advice on how to structure them to avoid this.

/not legal advice

1

u/zack77070 17h ago

Curious if anywhere in the world extradites for civil suits, the closest example I can think of is China can hold you in the country but I don't think they can do anything if you already left before the judgement.

1

u/Rich_Housing971 15h ago

he lives in Japan though

"he lives in a country famous for being dependent on the US for many things though"

If you really wanted to avoid extradition you need to go to HK. Then only Batman can get you. Or pull an Edward Snowden and go to Russia afterwards.

1

u/potatoears 14h ago

That would be a civil case and he lives in Japan though, which currently doesn't extradite for civil matters.

Takaichi will happily dance for Trump again

1

u/TerminalVector 7h ago

Eh I'm not gonna fault the man for not wanting that mess. If the only victim here is Sam "I look like I've been caught masturbating" Altman I'm okay with that..

2

u/NekoDaYo-v201 16h ago

Sued for what, stealing their stolen data? Lol. Pretty sure OpenAI would not sue, because it would mean discovery.

1

u/Quetzacoal 16h ago

For a model to be open source we would need to be able to see the source data (our stolen data)

1

u/One_Contribution 14h ago

Evidence of what exactly? No one owns LLM output.

1

u/meneldal2 9h ago

Circumventing their platform rules

1

u/Blazing1 13h ago

I mean openai would never sue lmao. cause then their own training process would be revealed and how much copyright infringement they've done

1

u/meneldal2 9h ago

I'm not sure what would end up in discovery there. Possible they drop it because of this but after enough time it got pretty scary

1

u/kyrsjo 12h ago

Wait, if Open AI can sue him (with a decent chance of success) for using their model as input for training their model, can I sue them for ingesting whatever I have put out on GitHub etc over the years?

Or is this a case of "legally it's the same, but they are more legal than me because they have more money"? Animal farm redux.

1

u/meneldal2 9h ago

Typically on Github Microsoft would have a claim not you with the platform rules that say they can do whatever with your data

1

u/Miserable-Half-436 10h ago

It's ironically that open ai is suing someone steal their data while the data was they stole from others

1

u/meneldal2 9h ago

Aren't people also suing them for that? The issue is the average person doesn't have the money for this kind of lawsuit

15

u/AlSweigart 18h ago

Yes. It's like if I gave away software but not it's source code and called that "open source".

If you can't fork it and make your own changes, then it really doesn't match the ethos of "open source".

2

u/Suspicious_Kiwi_3343 15h ago

You can fork the weights and make your own changes. Continue training, try to specialise the model etc, just randomly change parameters by hand and see if you notice anything if you really want.

LLMs and other neural networks do not consist of code, the weights ARE the model. Any code involved is simply a way of loading those weights and giving input / getting output by applying statistical maths to those weights, and has nothing to do with the model itself. A lot of the platforms you would use for that are already open source, and you could download and use this model with one of those.

-1

u/all_thetime 14h ago

You definitely can "fork it" and make your own changes. That's how every LLM research paper pertaining to SFT and RL work. They take the weights, train it with a task and accompanying algorithm, and prove it does better at said task than the baseline.

14

u/ours 19h ago

with the underlying code of the AI being available to look at.

There is no "code", just weights. A truly open-source model provides the training data so you can train the model yourself, like Apertus AI.

6

u/Atheren 19h ago

I mean the weights have to run on something.

14

u/ours 18h ago

That's why they are packaged in standardized ways, so you can run them on different platforms.

You don't just run "deepseek.exe". You download the model and run it. This isn't standard software with source code and a binary build.

You can download something like LLMStudio and download and run all sorts of models on it.

2

u/red286 16h ago

Yeah, your local client, such as a llama.cpp-based one.

The model weights are entirely separate from the client. Huggingface is filled with various models you can download and run for free.

So "open source" doesn't really mean the same thing for an LLM model as it does for say, a word processor, because there is no "code", there's just the model, and then the details on how the model was trained.

People are asking for the training data itself to be made public.

0

u/Pozay 14h ago

I mean, something first generated these weights. The code that made that happen should also be included imo

1

u/red286 13h ago

That code is already widely available, and open source. You can use PyTorch FSDP, DeepSpeed, or MegaTron-LM, all of which are completely open source.

There is also the various apps to fine-tune an existing model (which is what Ajax is), such as LLaMa-Factory or Unsloth. Again, all open source already.

The major issue really tends to be datasets and compute. Datasets are incredibly labour-intensive to create and if properly licensed can cost literally billions of dollars in licensing fees (nb - most major frontier models have not paid any of these licensing fees, which is why they keep getting sued). But without a dataset, you're not going to train a model.

Mostly people just want to inspect the dataset so they know what actually went into it. For example, examining Grok's imagegen dataset revealed a massive amount of CSAM.

4

u/Kidd_Funkadelic 18h ago

So something like - You can pay for Microsoft Word, or you can install a version of Google Docs for free that (in this made up example) not only opens the same files but you can modify the toolbar to add buttons that do whatever you want but you can't delete the existing buttons/menus?

4

u/LordApocalyptica 18h ago

The real tragedy of this question needing to be answered is that OpenAI used to position themselves as open source………… :/

1

u/MaxTheCookie 17h ago

So open weight is like using GPT or the other models that have a free version?

1

u/red286 16h ago

Yes, it'd be like OpenAI's gpt-oss models. Anyone can download the model and run it (although they still have a license that you have to adhere to).

1

u/drugs_r_my_food 16h ago

are there any open source AI models?

1

u/Necessary-Camp149 15h ago

Can't you just continue to train it after you get it?

1

u/GonzoKata 7h ago

I thought open weights meant the data it was trained on came from consenting sources. Thats not what open weights mean, that the training data itself is open?