In brief
- PewDiePie said in a new video that OpenAI banned his account twice while he built Ajax, a small AI model meant to run on a home computer. Tech City Authority found no public response from OpenAI.
- He says he used GPT-5.6 Sol to generate training data after his account was restored, then stripped the model’s refusals with the open-source tool Heretic.
- Ajax is reportedly a 9-billion-parameter model built on Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5. A countdown on its download page ends at 08:25 Japan time on October 3.
YouTuber PewDiePie says OpenAI banned his account twice while he built Ajax, a small AI model meant to run on your own computer and browse the web for you. He tells the story in a new video on his YouTube channel.
Ajax is what he calls “a fine-tuned AI model.” That means an existing model got extra training for one specific job. Here, the job is working inside Odysseus, the free, self-hosted AI app PewDiePie launched in June.
Run on your own machine, a model like this keeps your emails and calendar at home instead of on a company’s servers. There’s also no subscription fee, though your own hardware does the heavy lifting.
Ajax is supposed to be a 9-billion-parameter model built on Alibaba’s open-source Qwen 3.5. Parameters are the adjustable numbers that make up an AI’s “brain,” and more is generally considered more powerful. The model is pending for release but will be available on his website once Pewdiepie thinks it’s ready.
The two bans
PewDiePie said he wanted to distill from GPT-5.6 Sol, the flagship model OpenAI released on July 9. Distillation means training a smaller AI on a bigger one’s answers, like a student copying the class genius’s homework.
The prize was Sol’s reasoning tokens, the chunks of text a model writes on a hidden scratchpad while it works through a problem. OpenAI keeps that scratchpad encrypted.
In the video, he said he found a study that cracks it using OpenAI’s own API. He also said he would never have cracked OpenAI, but OpenAI banned him anyway. He called the ban unjustified, disputed it, and the account came back online some time later.
Then, he said, he used Sol again to create seed data, the starter examples a model learns from, and OpenAI banned him a second time. OpenAI’s terms of use bar using its output to develop competing models, and he got banned again.
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→Researchers showed in August that encrypted reasoning blocks from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google could be replayed to a weaker sister model that wrote them out in plain text. They decoded 315,320 of them from public code repositories.
On Sept. 30, OpenAI said it disrupted a campaign by people associated with Moonshot AI, the developer of Kimi, to extract its models’ hidden reasoning. The company said it closed a pathway that let someone replay another user’s encrypted reasoning to recover its contents.
Taking the “no” out of AI
To make Ajax uncensored—meaning it answers requests that ChatGPT-style assistants refuse—PewDiePie used Heretic, an open-source tool that removes a model’s built-in refusals. It compares how the model reacts to harmful and harmless prompts, finds the pattern behind its refusals, and cuts it out.
This is known as “abliteration” and it’s essentially a technique that lobotomizes a model so it doesn’t need to be jailbroken because it always agrees to do whatever it’s asked to do.
The surgery is not clean. PewDiePie says Ajax took “a little brain damage,” but that it handles tasks like sorting inboxes and browsing about nine times out of 10.
He is also still training it with GRPO, a method where the model attempts the same task 16 times and learns from the attempts that work.
Pewdiepe said he chose which refusals to remove and drew the limit at “causing harm to other people or causing harm to yourself.” His lawyer, he said, told him to state that Ajax is not designed to give dangerous, actionable instructions.
Small model, big pitch
His case for small models is cost and energy. By his own napkin math, one copy of a rumored trillion-parameter frontier model needs about 27 of his computers and the electricity of roughly 150 houses.
PewDiePie calls Ajax version one. He said he still has to rerun the ablation, then compress (quantize) and benchmark the model to check that nothing broke.
Ajax is not downloadable yet. At first, it came with a countdown on the download page for 08:25 Japan time on October 3. Now that timer doesn’t exist anymore.
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