According to YouTuber PewDiePie, OpenAI banned his account twice during the period when he was building Ajax. Ajax is a small AI model designed to run on your own computer and browse web pages for you. He shared this experience in a new video he posted on the YouTube channel.
Ajax is what he refers to as "fine-tuning the AI model." This means that, based on an existing model, additional training is conducted for a specific task. In this case, that task is carried out within his free, self-hosted AI application Odysseus, which was launched in June.
Running such models on your own machine allows you to keep emails and calendars locally, rather than on the company's servers. There is also no subscription fee, but the computational load will fall on your own hardware.
It is claimed that Ajax is a model with 9 billion parameters, built upon Alibaba's open-source Qwen 3.5. Parameters are adjustable values that constitute the "intelligence" of AI; generally, the more parameters there are, the stronger the model is considered to be. This model is still awaiting release at present, but PewDiePie indicates that once they feel it is ready, they will make it available for download on their own website.
Two bans
PewDiePie said that he originally wanted to distill from the flagship model GPT-5.6 Sol released by OpenAI on July 9th. Distillation refers to using the answers of a larger model to train a smaller AI, which is somewhat similar to a student copying the homework of a top student in the class.
What he values is the token reasoning of Sol, which refers to the text fragments that the model writes down on a hidden draft paper when solving problems. OpenAI will then encrypt this draft paper.
In the video, he said that he had found a study that could be used to crack this mechanism through OpenAI his own API. He also stated that he would never truly “crack” OpenAI, but OpenAI still banned his account. He claimed that there was no legitimate reason for this ban and raised objections, after which his account was re-enabled at some point.
Subsequently, he said that he used Sol again to generate seed data, which is the initial example used for model learning, and then OpenAI banned him for the second time. The terms of use for OpenAI prohibit its output for the development of competitive models, so he was banned once more.
In August, researchers demonstrated that encrypted inference blocks from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google could be replayed to a weaker “sister model”, allowing the latter to write them out in plaintext. They decoded 315,320 such fragments from public code repositories.
On September 30, OpenAI stated that it thwarted an attempt by individuals associated with Moonshot AI to extract the reasoning content hidden within its model. The company claimed that it had blocked a pathway that would have allowed someone to replay another user's encrypted reasoning and restore that content.
Remove "reject" from AI.
In order to make Ajax become "unreviewed" – that is, to respond to requests that would otherwise be rejected by assistants of the ChatGPT type – PewDiePie used Heretic, an open-source tool designed to remove the built-in rejection mechanisms of models. This tool compares how the model responds to harmful and harmless prompts, identifies the patterns behind those rejections, and then removes them.
This practice is known as “abliteration”, which is essentially a technique that causes the model to “lose its judgment ability”. In this way, it does not need to bypass restrictions through jailbreaking, as it will always agree to carry out what is requested of it.
This “surgery” is not perfect. PewDiePie says that Ajax has “some brain damage” as a result, but it still has a success rate of about 90% when it comes to tasks such as organizing the inbox and browsing web pages.
He is still using GRPO to continue training it. This is a method that allows the model to attempt the same task 16 times and learn from the successful attempts.
PewDiePie said that he would choose on his own which rejections to remove, setting the boundary at 'causing harm to others or causing harm to himself.' He stated that his lawyer advised him to clarify that Ajax is not designed to provide dangerous or actionable instructions.
Small model, big selling point
The reasons he uses to defend small models are cost and energy consumption. According to his own rough estimates, a cutting-edge model with allegedly trillions of parameters would require about 27 of his computers, as well as an amount of electricity equivalent to that consumed by around 150 households.
PewDiePie refers to Ajax as the first version. He said that he still needs to re-execute the process of rejecting responses once, and then compress (quantize) the model and conduct benchmark tests to confirm that there are no issues.
Ajax is currently not available for download. Initially, there was a countdown on the download page pointing to October 3rd at 08:25 Japanese time. Now, that timer is no longer visible.
