PewDiePie Builds AI Council That Turns Against Him in Ambitious Self-Hosting Experiment

PewDiePie goes all-in on self-hosting AI using modded GPUs, with plans to build his own model soon -- YouTuber pits multiple chatbots against each other to find the best answers

PewDiePie has built a custom web UI for self-hosting AI models called "ChatOS" that runs on his custom PC with 2x RTX 4000 Ada cards, along with 8x modded RTX 4090s with 48 GB of VRAM. Running open-source models from Baidu and OpenAI, PewDiePie made a "council" of bots that voted on the best responses, and then built "The Swarm" for data collection that will become the foundation of his own model coming next month. Once the poster boy for gaming on YouTube, he has settled into a semi-retired life in Japan with his wife, Marzia. While he no longer uploads as frequently, and his content has shifted from exaggerated, reaction-channel-style videos to more family vlogs, it seems his love for computing has reemerged. Felix was never known to be particularly tech-savvy, but he's gone on a crazy arc as of late -- de-Googling his life, building his first gaming PC, and learning how to write code. His latest act is one of decentralization: self-hosting AI models and eventually building his own. In a new YouTube video, Felix explained how his "mini data center" is helping fuel medical research. He's donating compute from his 10-GPU system to Folding@home so scientists can use it to run protein folding simulations, and he's created a team so other people can join with their computers to contribute as well. It's a noble cause, but PewDiePie wanted to venture into unknown territory and explore the other, obvious thing you can do when you have a lot of GPUs -- running AI. Felix's computer has 2x RTX 4000 Ada cards, along with 8x modded RTX 4090s with 48 GB of VRAM, totaling his memory pool out to roughly 256 GB, which is enough to run many of the largest models today. That's exactly what he did, starting out with Meta's LLaMA 70B, then jumping to OpenAI's GPT-OSS-120B, which he said ran surprisingly well and felt "just like ChatGPT but much faster." This is where he first described his web UI called ChatOS, which he custom-built to interact with models using vLLM. To truly "max out," he tried Qwen 2.5-235B, one of Baidu's newer models, which typically requires over 300 GB of VRAM at full precision. Felix managed to get it running by using quantization, which dynamically reduces the bit precision of each layer, compressing the model without affecting functionality. This lets him handle context windows of up to 100,000 tokens -- essentially the length of a textbook -- something very rare for locally run LLMs. This is where Felix jokingly says the model has too much power, as it was coded in front of him so fast that it made him feel insecure about learning programming. But he turned that dread around and put it to use for his own plans. "The machine is making the machine," claimed Pewds, since now he was asking it for code to add extra features to ChatOS. Felix demoed his web UI, adding search, audio, RAG, and memory to Qwen. As soon as the model gained access to the internet, the answers became expectedly more accurate. He added RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), which lets the AI perform deep research -- basically looking up one thing and then branching out to find related info, mimicking how a human might use Google. But this wasn't the coolest part of his AI; that award goes to memory. Pewds went on a tangent about how our data isn't really ours and that he's often spooked by AI knowing things about him in chat that he previously talked about. Despite deleting the chats, the data remains and is still used to train models unless you actively remove it from a company's servers. This is where connecting your local data to the AI becomes a game-changer. Through RAG, Felix demonstrated that the model can retrieve information locally from his computer, so much so that it even knew things like his address or phone number. This is where the general experimentation stopped, and the last few minutes of the video devolved into what our future sentient AI overlords might call "morally questionable." Felix built an army of chatbots that all convene to provide answers to a single prompt. Those responses would then be voted on in a democratic process, with the weakest chatbots being eliminated from the "council." Eventually, the council learned that its members would be removed if they failed, and the AI became so smart that it colluded against Pewds, strategizing to game the system and avoid being erased. The solution was simple: switch to a smaller model with fewer parameters, and the bots once again fell victim to the circus. From this came the idea of "The Swarm" -- a collection of dozens of AIs running at once using 2B-parameter models. Pewds said he didn't realize he could run more than one AI on one GPU, which led to the creation of 64 of them across his entire stack. It was so over-the-top that the web UI eventually crashed. On the flip side, this gave Felix the idea of creating his own model. The Swarm was great at collecting data, which Pewds says he'll use to "create his own Palantir," a project he teased for a future video. With this came the realization that smaller models are often more efficient; they're fast and light, and, when combined with search and RAG, can punch well above their weight. Felix ended the video by reminding viewers that you don't need a beast PC to run AI models, and that he hopes to share his own soon for anyone to self-host.

PewDiePie creates an AI council, appoints himself supreme leader, and wipes out members who underperform -- only for his 'councillors' to collude against him

I must admit, I never really kept up with the still hugely popular YouTuber PewDiePie (to the tune of 110 million subscribers). So imagine my surprise when I discovered that these days he's doing bizarre hardware experiments, like bifurcating his PCIe slots to install a ludicrous amount of Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada GPUs, with an additional RTX 4090 thrown in for good luck. All for the sake of science and AI. So, what does one do with a $20,000 rig (that hiss you're hearing is all the air leaving my lungs at once)? Well, in the beginning, the YouTuber -- whose real name is Felix Kjellberg -- ran protein folding simulations at night in aid of cancer research. Neat! But it wasn't long before Kjellberg disappeared into the rabbit warren of locally hosting massive AI models, eventually creating an AI-powered council and appointing himself as dictator. Kjellberg explains that instead of asking Google or querying ChatGPT things like, 'who would be the best creator to collaborate with next,' he instead consults his AI council. He elaborates, "I have eight GPUs that can run the same model [specifically a version of Qwen]. Each one of them is a different council member with different personalities. So, it's a democratic process. I consult my council. They all give me an answer and then they vote. Democracy!" Naturally, this system quickly fell apart. Kjellberg continues, "Only a couple council members were actually useful. The rest were just garbage. No one ever voted for them. Trash. So of course I had to kill them and replace them with new ones." Kjellberg then made the mistake of making sure his 'AI council' had some idea that losing too many votes would cause their SQL database to be wiped from the face of existence. He explains, "The worst part [was] they colluded against me. They started voting strategically -- helping each other even!" But the YouTuber didn't stop there, realising he didn't need to arbitrarily limit himself to one AI model per GPU. He ultimately chose to use The Swarm, a madding crowd of 64 AI models which causes Kjellberg's web UI to lag when they all sound off. Though this experience has inspired the YouTuber to noodle around with his own AI, that doesn't necessarily mean Kjellberg is now a full-throated, evangelising AI tech bro. For one thing, Kjellberg recently deGoogled his life amid privacy concerns, and revisits that theme here, raising the point of how hard it is to fully delete your data from ChatGPT. With his local setup, Kjellberg at the very least directly controls what the data The Swarm is pulling from (but admits giving it much of the data Google had previously collected on him). For another, Kjellberg says he is not at all interested in AI video or image generation, saying, "I genuinely think AI art looks ass. It looks bad. You can tell immediately it's AI generated. And the art that does look cool has been straight up ripped off from another artist. So, why not just look up the artist?" Though I'm hardly a PewDiePie fan (to say nothing of how I can only dream of getting within sneezing distance of a $20,000 rig), we can at least agree that human artists are just better.

YouTuber PewDiePie side quest: makes AI service with 'council members' who collude against him

TL;DR: PewDiePie built a powerful 10-GPU mini-datacenter using modded RTX 4090 cards to self-host Baidu's Qwen AI model. He created an AI "council" with distinct personalities that began colluding, prompting him to replace it with a simpler system to avoid losing control. This showcases innovative, private AI experimentation. YouTuber "PewDiePie" has been busy building a monster PC system and playing around creating his own AI service using Chinese open-source models, and modded NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 48GB graphics cards. Check it out: PewDiePie has effectively created a 10-way GPU cluster as a "mini-datacenter" that uses PCIe bifurcation to spread out the PCIe lanes to handle all of the GPUs. The YouTuber was playing around by hosting models like Llama 70B, but realized that he has enough GPUs and VRAM capacity to run a much bigger 240 billion parameter AI model. This is when he discovered Baidu's Qwen open-source AI model, creating a totally private, self-hosted AI system. This is where things take a hilarious turn... as PewDiePie assigned each one of the 8 GPUs as a different council member, with different personalities. He said that at this point, it's a democratic process, where he would consult his council, all giving a different answer, and then they vote. He wanted it to be better, so he created a new system that automatically generates new council members, different ones, so that it's constantly improving. He customized it further, to really make sure that if they know they don't perform in the council, they're dead, gone. He added that "this was a terrible idea". He worked out that the council members -- AI, just to be clear -- colluded against PewDiePie. They began voting strategically, helping each other, with PewDiePie joking that he was "betrayed by his own council". An interesting story and play with AI that we haven't heard about just yet, where a closed-off AI system was created with "council members" that ended up colluding and seemingly becoming self-aware. This pushed PewDiePie to switch out the system for something "dumber", so that -- we guess -- the system didn't take him over and turn him into a bio-human under their council-member control, probably.