The YouTube King Creates AI

From being the world's most famous YouTuber, PewDiePie is now joining the AI race with his Odysseus project. Photo: PewDiePie.

Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie), the content creator who once held the record for the most subscribers on YouTube, has just launched an AI platform called Odysseus with the ambition of bringing a ChatGPT-like experience to users' personal computers.

In the announcement video , PewDiePie describes Odysseus as an "AI workspace" that combines many popular features from ChatGPT, Claude, and other open-source projects. The biggest difference lies in the fact that the platform operates on a self-hosted model, meaning users can run AI directly on their devices instead of sending data to the technology company's servers.

"No following, no subscriptions, no shady dealings. It's yours and will always be yours," PewDiePie declared in the promotional video.

According to this YouTuber, the project developed from a personal need when he wanted to use local AI but couldn't find a solution with sufficient features. The aspects PewDiePie mentioned include long-term memory, in-depth research, and automated AI agents.

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At the heart of Odysseus is its open-source OpenCode-based agent. This tool can independently perform many tasks on a computer, such as downloading files, editing documents, browsing the web, or running programs.

PewDiePie stated that Odysseus had successfully executed a complex command. The process involved finding a video file on another computer, converting the format, using Whisper (a speech recognition model developed by OpenAI) to transcribe the speech, and sending back the complete recording without manual intervention.

In addition to its automation capabilities, Odysseus also integrates Deep Research features to synthesize information from multiple sources, a document editor, note-taking application, calendar and task management, photo editing, virtual characters for individual or group chat, and more.

Odysseus isn't an entirely new AI model. Instead of developing the entire technology from scratch, PewDiePie chose to integrate several existing open-source AI projects, from search engines and AI assistants to document editors, and then combine them into Odysseus.

According to the YouTuber, the biggest motivation behind Odysseus is concern about users increasingly sharing personal data with commercial AI platforms. "The more access AI is given, the more useful it becomes. But in return, users are also giving a huge portion of their personal data to tech corporations," he shared.

Therefore, Odysseus is designed so that all AI data and memory reside on the user's device. However, the platform still supports connections to online models like ChatGPT or Claude via API if the user requires it.