Once the most popular YouTuber in the world, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, is adopting a new role: he is now offering a free alternative to ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI platforms.

Odysseus is an AI workspace with a twist: it is self-hosted, meaning you don't need to hand over your data to corporations and hope they don't get hacked. And, of course, it's free, which is another reason to at least try it out.

PewDiePie doesn't hide his "borrowing" bits from other systems: "Basically, it's Claude and ChatGPT's web UI, but self-hosted. So, you get access to all of it, but better."

But the project still stands (well, at least for a couple of days now). It started with PewDiePie wishing to have all those great things from popular models for himself. And while the longer you talk to AI, the better it understands you, all this info you pour into ChatGPT and Claude goes right to these tech companies.

Odysseus solves this problem by staying on your PC only, although you can plug in APIs there as well. "I built Odysius because I believe in privacy and self-hosting," the YouTuber said. "It's about the principle. If maybe you don't care about your private data, the reality is these companies abuse it. Your private info, your address, your phone number, your relatives, a scary level of information is stored about you and is traded between companies."

PewDiePie advertises the agent as self-evolving, so it might start a little "dumb," but it will get better the longer you use it. It remembers what you talk about and can even fetch files from a different computer (owned by you, of course).

But PewDiePie is not just adopting AI to do the work for him, he doesn't want that. For example, Odysseus has a document editor, which can write files live so you can see and review them yourself.

So he "stole" the idea from Claude but made it more human-friendly: you can type whatever you want and then ask AI to fix mistakes, fact-check the text, and improve it without turning it into AI slop.

"It's a tool, and it's not meant to replace what I'm doing."

Another fun feature is an image editor that could potentially replace Photoshop. Well, eventually. "I am building my own Photoshop," PewDiePie said boldly but admitted that it's far from being as robust.

And help he already received: Odysseus works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and even on mobile thanks to collective efforts.

Now, it's too early to talk about its effectiveness, but you must understand that an AI built by an AI can easily have a bouquet of problems, security ones included.

Some users have already found vulnerabilities that can help hackers do what they do best, thanks to the agent's ability to connect to PCs. Jamieson O'Reilly has a great breakdown of how it can happen, which will hopefully help PewDiePie protect his project better.

Have you tried the new AI tool already? 

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