An AI VTuber is setting world records on Twitch

Twitch has a new Hype Train record—and it wasn’t set by a human.

As you probably know, artificial intelligence is a contentious topic in the creator space. Platforms like YouTube and creator services companies like Spotter have gone all-in on this latest thing, making AI-powered production tools and promising that creators (and creators’ control over their content) remain an important directive for their projects.

But YouTube and other platforms have also seen a deluge of short-form AI slop challenging real videos for views, and creators have potentially had their content scraped without their consent by multiple LLMs. Both those things have stirred AI anxiety among creators.

Some uses of AI, though, seem to generate significant support from the creator community at large—and one of those uses is Neurosama, an AI VTuber created by game developer/self-dubbed “professional turtle” Vedal.

Vedal originally created Neurosama back in 2018 as a bot that would play the rhythm game osu!. They recently revamped her as a full-fledged VTuber with her own cutesy animated model. Basically, at her bones, Neurosama is an advanced chatbot that can play games like Minecraft and converse with viewers. She’s helped Vedal’s channel grow to nearly 700,000 subscribers, and at press time is live with 21,000 concurrent viewers.

And, as of Jan. 1, she’s also the record holder for longest Hype Train, beating out streamer and game developer Pirate Software (aka Jason “Thor” Hall).

Hall originally set the record back in December 2023, but broke his own record this past April, setting the new bar at Level 106, with 54,380 subs and more than 8.2 million Bits bought/gifted during one three-hour train. (For those unfamiliar, Hype Trains are sort of like mini impromptu subathons that are kicked off and kept going by viewer actions like gifting subscriptions and cheering. They can theoretically go on forever, but most taper off after a few minutes, since keeping them going requires viewers to be constantly gifting/donating/etc.)

Neurosama’s new record is Hype Train Level 111, with 84,904 subs bought and 1,201,225 Bits gifted.

If we assume Neurosama has a 50/50 revenue split with Twitch for subscriptions, that means she made nearly $212,000 in subs (if all those subs were Tier 1, which costs $4.99/month; she may have made more with higher-tier subs). As for Bits, streamers get $1 for every 100 donated, which shakes out to another $12,000.

This is right on track with Zach Bussey’s previous estimation that it would take at least $500,000 of viewers’ money to reach a Level 100 Hype Train.

“so it seems we have somehow broken the twitch hype train world record,” Vedal tweeted after the stream wrapped. “shout out to the swarm, wouldn’t have been possible without you.”

It wouldn’t be Twitch without a little friendly rivalry, so Hall responded shortly after the record break, congratulating Vedal but also promising that his community of “goblins” will “return fire” on April Fools’ Day.