A cheeky AI earns €215,000 in a short time on Twitch, breaking a record for the hype train

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Yesterday on the night of January 1st. on January 2nd. In 2025, a record was broken on Twitch: the record for the most successful hype train of all time. Expressed in numbers, the chatbot Neuro_sama received over 84,000 paid Twitch subscriptions through a subathon, which corresponds to around €215,000. The special thing: Neuro_sama is not a human, but a chat bot that is operated by an AI.

What is a hype train? The hype train is activated when Twitch registers an increase in bits or subscriptions within a certain time window. All viewers can now help keep the hype train alive and continue to fill the hype-o-meter.

A hype train is actually pure money-making by Twitch: When a streamer receives continuous financial support from viewers, a fictitious hype train goes higher and higher and “rewards” the viewers and the channel with certain emotes. A countdown is running to signal: Get more money in quickly, otherwise the hype train will run out.

Twitch gets a cut every time streamers receive money from their viewers, so it’s actually all just a huge advertising effort for Twitch – with no real relevance. But it’s always a big deal for a streamer’s community and a windfall for the streamer in question.

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So many donations came in that the chatbot stalled

This was the record so far: Former Blizzard developer Jason Thor Hall, who performs as PirateSoftware, set the previous record on Twitch in April 2024. At that time he reached level 106 on the hype train, but mainly through donations that came in with the Twitch currency “Bits”.

Neuro_sama has now reached level 111 and especially with subs. Because there was a subathon in which each additional paid subscription extended the stream by 11 seconds.

The timer went up to over 250 hours during the flood of donations.

via X

Exactly how many subscriptions came in? At the end of the hype train, Neuro_sama had 84,094 subs – that’s around $212,260, the equivalent of €204,826.

There were also 1,201,225 bits – that’s about $12,012.50 – about €11,591.

Neuro_sama doesn’t get all the money here, but proportionally after taxes and what Twitch gets.

The chatbot Neuro_sama is proving to be a permanent source of income for the programmer, which now determines his life.

Here you can see the moment when the hype train was broken. Neuro_sama is reacting slowly because the many donations apparently act like a DDOS attack.

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A poorly running subathon becomes a stroke of luck for clever programmers

How exactly did this happen? The process is discussed on reddit:

  • A subathon actually works like this: the streamer starts with a “countdown”. When it drops to 0, the stream is over. Viewers can extend the stream with donations and subscriptions. If a stream is going extremely well, a streamer sets a maximum time limit: This is what Ludwig did with his record back then, he was online for 31 days in a row. During that time, the streamer, who coined subathons on Twitch, took in $1.3 million.
  • At Neuro_Sama it was apparently the case that a random element was built in, which meant that a subscription was worth fewer and fewer seconds, which would have ended the stream “very quickly”.
  • Ultimately, one of Vedal’s partners tried to save the stream by starting a hype train and it then escalated completely.

    • These are the reactions: Once again, Vedal is congratulated for creating an AI so entertaining that it beats even the best products from the tech giants.

    Comments on reddit say: “Please don’t kill me, Skynet”

    “This is crazy. This is just totally crazy. This is so crazy.”

    What’s special? Neuro_sama is a chatbot that speaks to viewers via a language model. The bot has the avatar of an anime girl. Neuro_sama is known for his bold statements and for regularly trying to plunge his 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 interacting with other streamers, such as programmer Vedal himself. We recently reported on Neuro_sama on MeinMMO when the chat Bot was technically the most successful streamer on Twitch: The most successful streamer on Twitch is a man

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