The Drama

Real talk: The plot thickens in the AI space. YouTuber PewDiePie just dropped a video claiming he got hit with two back-to-back bans from OpenAI while working on his own project, Ajax. Ajax is a small, fine-tuned AI model designed to run locally on your own hardware via his app, Odysseus.

The Tech

PewDiePie says he wanted to "distill" knowledge from OpenAI’s flagship model, Sol (released in July), by using its reasoning tokens—the hidden text a model generates while solving a problem. He claims he used a study to crack these encrypted tokens, which is how he caught OpenAI’s attention.

OpenAI’s terms of service explicitly block using its output to build competing models, so when he used Sol to generate seed data for training, the ban hammer came down again.

Making it "Uncensored"

To make Ajax "uncensored"—meaning it skips those annoying ChatGPT-style refusals—PewDiePie used a technique called "abliteration." It’s basically digital surgery that removes the model's built-in refusal patterns.

Lowkey, the surgery isn’t perfect. He admitted Ajax took "a little brain damage" but said it still handles tasks like sorting emails successfully about nine out of 10 times. He’s also using GRPO, a training method where the model tries a task 16 times and learns from the wins. He clarified he drew the line at anything involving harm to self or others, and his lawyer advised him that the tool isn't for dangerous or actionable instructions.

The Future

Ajax is built on Alibaba’s open-source Qwen 3.5 and is meant to keep your personal data on your machine instead of in the cloud. It’s not available for download just yet. While he previously had a countdown clock on his site, it's since been taken down while he finishes training, quantizing, and benchmarking the model.

Why it matters

This is a major W for the local-first, privacy-conscious crowd who are tired of feeding their data into Big Tech's servers. But as always, remember: this is not financial advice, and experimental "uncensored" AI models are still in their wild west phase. DYOR (do your own research) before running this kind of stuff on your own rig.