Pewdiepie declares war on big tech following the release of his free and local AI workspace

YouTube veteran Pewdiepie is waging war on big tech by promising privacy with his latest “local-first” artificial intelligence (AI) project, Odysseus.

Swedish YouTuber Felix Kjellberg, known predominantly as Pewdiepie, has launched his own AI workplace that lets users take full control of their AI usage.

In a YouTube video, Pewdiepie claims that Odysseus doesn’t track users and isn’t a subscription-based service.

So far, the project has 52.6k stars and 6.2k forks on GitHub.

Odysseus is completely free to use, and it can be “yours and yours forever,” Pewdiepie said.

The best description of the tool is that it’s an “AI workspace” that uses Claude and ChatGPT's web user interface, but doesn’t send your data to their servers because it’s completely self-hosted and can be used from your computer or phone.

Odysseus sticks it to big tech

Typically, AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic collect all data from conversations with their chatbots and store it on their servers for later use in training and evolving their AI models.

This is very important to understand, as sharing information with ChatGPT, Gemini, and other frontier models could be collected and used for training purposes.

Pewdiepie said he’d taken a different approach after becoming disillusioned with the idea that we are giving massive parts of ourselves to giant tech companies.

There are ways to opt out of letting AI companies train their models on your data or sending data deletion requests, but they’re not that easy to find.

You now own your own data

With Odysseus, users can self-host their own AI or use an API from any AI company they want.

Odysseus seems to fix the problem of other corporations owning your data, and the AI workplace ensures that users own their own data.

This makes it more difficult for AI companies to profile you and your relatives, as your data (in this context) will be managed by you, and you alone.

Some users might find this AI workspace redundant, as large companies with AI models, such as Google and Meta, already have access to your sensitive data when you use their other services.

But the point here is that Pewdiepie is privacy and self-hosting-focused, and seemingly just wants to set a precedent – that users don’t have to compromise their privacy or autonomy when using the latest technologies.

Odysseus AI agent

The AI workspace allows users to use popular chatbots as usual and to integrate AI agents into workflows.

Using code from the open-source agent Open Code, Pewdiepie was able to integrate an AI

agent, which can work alongside users autonomously.

The agent can download, create, edit, run files, and browse the web – along with a lot of other tasks that you don’t have to ask it to do every time, like you would ChatGPT.

Pewdiepie asked his AI agent to transcribe a video. The bot found the video file on his computer, converted it to a different format, and then used a specific piece of software to transcribe the audio.

The agent is described as “self-evolving,” meaning it won’t be immediately capable of fulfilling users' needs.

But the agent will “learn” from its mistakes the first time around and write itself instructions to ensure it can perform the task more quickly next time.

Persistent memory

Odysseus also has memory, so it will draw on pieces of information from previous conversations to gain the context needed to support the task.

As with other conventional AI, the more you use it, the better it will be when you use it the next time.

Which is interesting, Pewdiepie’s biggest frustration with mega AI companies is “the more you share about yourself with AI, the better it becomes…the more you give it access, the better it works.”

However, Odysseus allows users to take control of their data and doesn’t send any information to external servers.

Never miss an email

The AI workspace also ensures you stay up to date with important tasks and receive the necessary information, without having to manually trawl through calendars and inboxes.

Pewdiepie recounts how painful it was to check his emails regularly, often missing important information, which resulted in fines or financial penalties.

Odysseus will read your emails and flag ones that are important to you. This might sound risky, but since the information isn’t leaving the device, it’s essentially the same as checking your inbox on your computer.

From there, the email client can summarize and then draft a reply, making the email reply process easier overall.

Pewdiepie declares war on big tech

AI is becoming increasingly expensive for consumers and enterprises, with monthly costs ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars when using AI models.

A recent report claimed that Anthropic billed a company $500 million for one month of Claude use.

This may be because employees are automating tasks they dislike rather than those that are really valuable to the company, with some even using AI to check the weather, increasing costs for businesses.

Odysseus is completely free and open source, which means users can work on the product and take code from it to create their own AI workspaces.

The YouTube veteran asks his subscribers to help him keep building Odysseus so that users can take back control.

“The war on big tech has just begun.”

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