PewDiePie Ended Family Vlogs at 12.3M Views. Days Later, an AI Model Drew 2.1M

Oct 3, 2026 · ShinyPull Data Team

On September 22, PewDiePie uploaded a video called "Thank You and Goodbye." Coverage of it described his last family vlog, the end of four years of videos about life with his wife Marzia and their son, so the three-year-old can grow up off camera. The video has 12,297,495 views. Less than nine days later, on the night of September 30 in the US, he uploaded something very different: an AI model he had built himself, called Ajax, and a story about how OpenAI banned him twice while he was making it.

For a channel with 109 million subscribers, the question is whether the audience that showed up for the goodbye stays for the pivot. The numbers we track say mostly yes. The AI video has 2,130,567 views after about two and a half days, which puts it inside his normal range, and the channel has been adding views at more than five times its usual pace for 11 straight days.

What a quiet day looks like

Start with the baseline, because everything else is measured against it. With no new video, PewDiePie's channel adds about 323,000 views a day. That is the median of the 17 days from September 6 to September 22, and it barely moves: the lowest day was 252,775 and the highest was 370,661. For a channel with 4,667 videos and 29.5 billion lifetime views, that is the back catalogue doing the work. He does not need to post to be watched.

He also does not post much. Our video count for his channel went from 4,665 on September 3 to 4,667 on October 1, which means two uploads in the whole month. Both of them are in this story.

The goodbye

The goodbye video went up on September 22. On our September 23 reading the channel had added 6,882,514 views since the day before, which is 21 times a typical day. After that it decayed the way a big upload does: 3,270,217 the next day, then 1,688,224, then 982,407 and 784,605.

Our reading for September 28 was skipped, so the September 29 reading carries both days, about 523,000 each. On September 30 the channel added 777,290. A week after the goodbye, a normal day was still more than double the baseline. People kept arriving long after the event itself.

The video's own numbers say the same. It now has 402,551 likes and 19,011 comments, a like rate of about 3.3% of views. For a farewell, that is a warm one, and it is a lot of people choosing to be counted.

What he released

The video is titled "I seriously should NOT be dropping this," and YouTube stamps it at 02:21 UTC on October 1, which is 10:21 PM on September 30 in New York. According to Tom's Hardware and other coverage, Ajax is a 9-billion-parameter model he fine-tuned from Alibaba's Qwen3.5-9B. It is built to run on a home PC inside Odysseus, the self-hosted workspace he launched in May, where it works as an always-on assistant for search, email, calendar and to-do lists.

He also made it "uncensored," using an open-source tool to find and remove the refusals that models trace back to safety training, and he has said he drew the line at anything that harms other people or himself. The part that traveled furthest, though, was the other story. Reports say OpenAI banned his account twice during development, once explicitly for what it calls distillation, which means using one model's outputs to train another. He got the account back once, and the second ban came after he ran the model again to generate more training data. In the video he asks, "How did they even know?"

That is a technical subject, and it is a long way from a family vlog. It is also a topic most people only meet in headlines, and a 109-million-subscriber channel can put it in front of a very wide audience.

How 2.1 million views compares

Here is where the numbers matter. The AI video has 2,130,567 views, 63,462 likes and 4,171 comments. Three of his earlier videos sit at 2,675,541 views ("Meet our newest family member," July 2), 1,990,448 ("I tried to make a Manga," June 22) and 1,505,814 ("Earthquake by Mount Fuji," July 30). Those are lifetime counts after months, and the AI video is in the same band after two and a half days.

Our channel-wide readings agree. The October 2 reading shows 2,142,787 views added, 6.6 times a typical day, and October 3 adds 749,622, still 2.3 times. The like rate is about 3.0%, close to the goodbye's 3.3%. The people who watched the goodbye and the people who watched the AI video appear to be the same crowd.

Put the whole stretch together and the channel added 18,765,342 views across the 11 readings from September 23 to October 3. That is about 1.7 million a day, 5.3 times the baseline, and roughly 15.2 million views above what a quiet stretch would have produced. The two videos account for most of that, at about 12.3 million and 2.1 million.

What did not move

The subscriber count is flat at 109,000,000. That is not a stall. YouTube rounds large channels to three significant figures, so his count will not change until he gains about a million subscribers, and none of this shows up there. The views are the signal.

His other platforms are quiet in a different way. His Twitch followers drifted from 1,750,358 on September 3 to 1,750,049 on October 3, a loss of 309 in a month for a channel that is not streaming. His TikTok sits at 1,100,000 followers and did not move, though the account posted four times around September 29, with the post count going from 365 to 369. If the AI pivot is pulling in new fans, they are arriving on YouTube first.

What it means

The goodbye was an event, and it behaved like one: a spike, a long tail, and a lot of people paying attention to the end of something. The AI video is something else. It is an ordinary PewDiePie upload by his own standards, and by anyone else's standards that is enormous. A creator who steps away from his most personal format and returns less than nine days later with a technical project still gets his normal audience.

The next number to watch is the baseline. If the channel's daily views settle back to about 323,000 once both videos fade, the back catalogue is doing all the work and the two uploads were a pair of spikes. If it settles higher, the goodbye and the AI video brought in viewers who stayed to look through the rest of the channel. Two weeks of quiet days will say which.