PewDiePie didn't trust Big AI... so he built his own

A six-minute Code Report, uploaded on 5 October 2026, about Ajax, the uncensored model PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg) built for Odysseus, his free, self-hosted workspace for running AI agents. It starts with his council from late 2025: ten GPUs at home and a panel of agents voting on the best answer, which began voting to protect each other once he threatened to delete the low scorers. After that he wanted a model of his own.

Ajax is Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 9B, tuned for Odysseus, with its refusals cut out by a tool called Heretic. The video walks through how a hobbyist does it: supervised fine-tuning on examples of good tool use, then reinforcement learning with GRPO, the method DeepSeek published in 2024, then abliteration. The part with a moral is the data. He wanted tens of thousands of real examples, had few of his own, got little from his fans, and filled the gap with filtered synthetic data. The pay-off, in the video’s telling, is weights on your own drive instead of rent paid to a cloud landlord.

The OpenAI angle is the headline. OpenAI banned him twice, and the video calls both bans punishment for distillation, a smaller model learning from a bigger one’s outputs, as in Hinton’s 2015 paper. The reporting is narrower. By his own account the first ban followed an attempt to distill GPT-5.6 Sol’s reasoning, and was reversed on appeal; the second followed using Sol to make seed training data, which OpenAI’s terms forbid for rival models. OpenAI has not commented. The video’s own figures for the training set (20,000 wanted, about 300 by hand, about 2,000 after filtering) appear in no outlet that covered it. Roughly the second half is an ad.