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PewDiePie is setting AI free... and OpenAI is furious

PewDiePie (Felix) has built Ajax, an uncensored AI model he trained at home, after OpenAI banned his account twice for distillation. Ajax powers the open-source Odysseus project, a self-hosting tool for AI agent workflows with nearly 90,000 GitHub stars. Under the hood, Ajax is Alibaba's Qwen 9-billion-parameter model, fine-tuned for Odysseus with refusal removed. He used the Heretic tool to find and remove obliteration parameters, de-censoring the model, and fine-tuned it via distillation from GPT-5.5. Training involved supervised fine-tuning (teaching tool use) and reinforcement learning with GRPO (group relative policy optimization, introduced by DeepSeek). OpenAI forbids distillation in its terms of service and has hidden raw chain-of-thought outputs since 2024.

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