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.
