Felix Kjellberg has gone from screaming at barrels in Amnesia to training neural networks in his home office. The Swede known to the internet as PewDiePie spent the last few months building his own AI model, and on October 2 he finally showed it to the world in a video titled, with typical drama, “I seriously should NOT be dropping this.”
The project is called Ajax. It is a fine-tuned language model built to run entirely on home hardware, and it slots into Odysseus, the self-hosted AI workspace Kjellberg launched back in June. If you have followed his channel’s recent pivot from gaming to tech, this will not come as a shock. If you have not watched in a while, buckle up: the biggest YouTuber of the 2010s has become one of the loudest voices in the “run AI on your own machine” movement.
What Ajax actually is
According to Kjellberg, Ajax is a fine-tuned version of the Qwen 3.5 9B model, a 9-billion-parameter open-weights base. Nine billion parameters sounds like a lot until you compare it to the frontier models, which are orders of magnitude larger. That is the whole point. Ajax is small enough to run on a powerful gaming PC, which means your chats, emails and calendar entries never leave your hardware. No subscriptions, no cloud dashboards, no one else’s servers reading your mail.
In the launch video he demonstrated what Ajax is meant to do inside Odysseus: browse the web, run private searches, and handle email and calendar tasks. Less a chatbot you talk to for fun, more a quiet agent that works through the workspace’s tools on your behalf. He described the early build as completing its intended tasks roughly nine times out of ten, and was honest that it is still a work in progress.
He also said he “uncensored” the model using Heretic, an open-source tool that edits a model’s weights to reduce refusals on ordinary requests. He kept limits on requests involving harm to people, and said Ajax is not designed to produce dangerous instructions. As of the announcement, there was no final model card, no public benchmarks and no confirmed license for the weights, which has drawn the usual skepticism from the AI research crowd. They have a point: a model you cannot test is a claim, not a product.
The OpenAI drama
The headline-grabbing part of the video had nothing to do with parameters. Kjellberg claims OpenAI suspended his account twice while he was building Ajax. His telling of it: he wanted to improve his training data by “distilling” from OpenAI’s models, meaning feeding a big model’s answers into his smaller model as training material. OpenAI’s terms of use prohibit using its outputs to develop competing models, and he showed viewers what he said was an email from the company citing activity related to “Distillation.”
He said the first suspension was lifted after an appeal, and that he was suspended a second time when he ran the process again to seed more training data. He called the second ban, in his words, completely unjustified. Only one side has spoken publicly, so this remains his version of events. But it fits the theme of his whole project: he does not want to depend on a company that can switch off his access.
Why this matters for Sweden’s creator scene
Step back and the story gets more interesting than one YouTuber’s side project. Kjellberg, 36, moved to Japan years ago, but he remains Sweden’s most famous digital export. His pivot matters because of the audience he carries with him. Millions of people who came for Let’s Plays are now getting a gentle education in local-first AI, open-source software and the politics of who controls the models we use every day.
Odysseus itself is open source under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license, and the local-first pitch, conversations and data living on your own machine, puts Kjellberg in a lineage of tech culture that has deep Swedish roots: the same impulse that gave us the Pirate Bay debates, Spotify’s early file-sharing DNA and a national skepticism of centralized control. Whether Ajax becomes a serious tool or stays an eccentric hobby project, it is a fitting chapter. The kid from Gothenburg who once ruled YouTube is now trying to convince his audience that the smartest computer in their life should be the one they own.
