Last night from January 1st to January 2nd, 2025, a record was broken on Twitch: the record for the most successful hype train of all time. In numbers, the chatbot Neuro_sama received over 84,000 paid Twitch subscriptions through a subathon, which amounts to about €215,000. The special thing is: Neuro_sama is not a human, but a chatbot operated by AI.
What is a hype train? The hype train is activated when Twitch registers an increase in bits or subscriptions within a certain time frame. All viewers can now help keep the hype train alive and continue to fill the hype-o-meter.
A hype train is actually just a pure money-making scheme by Twitch: If a streamer receives continuous financial support from viewers, a fictitious hype train continues to rise and “rewards” viewers and the channel with certain emotes. A countdown runs to signal: Quickly throw in more money now, or else the hype train will run out.
Twitch receives a share every time streamers get money from their viewers, so it’s all just a huge advertising campaign for Twitch – without any real relevance. But it is always a big event for a streamer’s community and a financial blessing for the respective streamer.
So many donations came in that the chatbot lagged
This was the previous record: The former Blizzard developer Jason Thor Hall, who performs as PirateSoftware, set the previous record on Twitch in April 2024. At that time, he reached hype train level 106, primarily through donations that came in with the Twitch currency “bits.”
Neuro_sama has now reached level 111, mainly with subs. Because there was a subathon where each additional paid subscription extended the stream by 11 seconds.
The timer went up to over 250 hours during the flood of donations.
How many subscriptions came in exactly? At the end of the hype train, Neuro_sama stood at 84,094 subs – that’s about $212,260, equivalent to €204,826.
In addition, there were 1,201,225 bits – that’s about $12,012.50 – roughly €11,591.
However, Neuro_sama does not receive all the money, but rather a share after taxes and what Twitch takes.
The chatbot Neuro_sama, however, proves to be a constant source of income for the programmer, which now dictates his life.
Here you can see the moment when the hype train was broken. Neuro_sama reacts slowly because the many donations apparently act like a DDOS attack.
A poorly running subathon becomes a lucky event for a clever programmer
How did this happen exactly? On reddit, people discuss the process:
- A subathon usually runs like this: the streamer starts with a “countdown.” When it reaches 0, the stream ends. However, viewers can extend the stream with donations and subscriptions. If a stream is doing extremely well, a streamer sets a maximum time limit: This is what Ludwig did at his record, he was online for 31 consecutive days. During that time, the streamer who has defined subathons on Twitch earned $1.3 million.
- For Neuro_Sama, apparently a random element was built in, where a subscription was worth increasingly fewer seconds, which would have ended the stream “very quickly.”
- Ultimately, a partner of Vedal tried to save the stream by initiating a hype train, which then escalated completely.
These are the reactions: Once again, Vedal is congratulated for creating such an entertaining AI that even outshines the best products of tech giants.
In comments on reddit it says: “Please don’t kill me, Skynet.”
“This is insane. This is just totally insane. This is so crazy.”
What is special? Neuro_sama is a chatbot that speaks with viewers through a language model. The bot has the avatar of an anime girl. Neuro_sama is known for its cheeky remarks and regularly tries to drive its programmer Vedal into financial ruin.
Viewers admire Vedal’s achievement in programming this bot and find it extremely entertaining to listen to Neuro_sama, especially when it interacts with other streamers, such as programmer Vedal himself. We recently reported on MeinMMO about Neuro_sama when the chatbot was technically the most successful streamer on Twitch: The most successful streamer on Twitch is a man
