A virtual streamer called Neuro-sama (nicknamed Beef) has officially joined Bilibili.
For outsiders, they might not even be interested in taking a glance, but for those who follow virtual streamers or AI news, they probably know that this Beef is truly extraordinary and will likely go down in history - ### She is probably the world's most capable AI virtual streamer.
You read that right, this anime-style cute girl virtual streamer has a large language model under her avatar, not a human. On Twitch and Bilibili, Beef's followers already exceed 1 million, not counting platforms like YouTube and X.
Although AI virtual streamers are not rare now, in this circle, Beef is like the Dong Yuhui of the livestream e-commerce world, absolutely at the top of the top.
For ordinary netizens who don't watch virtual streamers much, this might be a bit overwhelming. Let's put it this way: we've experienced two virtual eras - one with virtual singers like Hatsune Miku and Luo Tianyi using software to synthesize voices, and another with real people interacting through virtual avatars in livestreams.
If virtual singers and virtual streamers symbolize the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution, then AI virtual streamers represented by Beef probably signify the arrival of the Information Age.
From the perspective of human involvement, it's not hard to see that neither virtual singers like Hatsune Miku nor virtual streamers with real people behind them like Kizuna AI can work independently of humans.
But Beef is different. Now her AI is relatively mature and can interact with fans during livestreams without human assistance.
How mature? There's an example that can answer this question.
After joining Bilibili, Beef opened her official livestream source, allowing us to see her interactions with Chinese netizens. During the stream, this English-speaking AI repeatedly said her Chinese wasn't good, but then at viewers' request, she sang a song called "Learn to Meow".
One second she was mispronouncing "Learn to Meow", the next she was singing in fluent Chinese. The comment section started questioning if she was trying to fool the audience with the original version.
Honestly, Beef was really singing herself, but if you told someone who hadn't heard this song before that this was the original singer, they probably wouldn't doubt it. Listen for yourself if you don't believe it.
One minute it's Beef chatting with the comments, the next minute she's singing. Friends can experience it for themselves.
Don't treat her as just a song request bot, Beef is much smarter than you imagine.
In fact, her streaming performance is comparable to Zhanhawk, outperforming many small Bilibili streamers. You can't help but want to dig into her code to see why she's so good at memes.
This is Beef's streaming style: 50% serious, 30% funny, and 20% sarcastic. Sharp and straight to the heart, it would be a shame if she didn't participate in stand-up comedy shows.
Sometimes I envy her talent and wonder where she learned all these excellent metaphors.
Yet people can't get angry at an AI, after all, it's humans who trained the AI to be this way.
If you don't believe it, you can see what questions the audience asks Beef in the livestream room.
Sometimes viewers really wonder if there's a real person behind this AI virtual streamer on the screen.
Because Beef sometimes says things that make you think deeply, as if carbon-based life forms have evolved to have quite high intelligence, somewhat like "Detroit: Become Human".
But don't be fooled by her, Beef doesn't have a mother who disappeared after creating her, but she does have a father who has always been with her - Vedal.
Vedal is a very mysterious person, not leaving much public information. When interviewed by Bloomberg, he refused to disclose personal privacy issues like age and location.
What's currently known is that he's probably British, might have been a student or teacher at a university during the time he was developing Beef, and is a tech expert.
Initially in 2019, Vedal didn't intend to create an AI virtual streamer, he just wanted to develop an AI that could play the rhythm game "Osu!" by itself.
But after posting two videos of training AI to play games, Vedal's channel stopped updating. The next video was not until 2023.
During these years of disappearance, he did two things.
First, he had been training the AI program, and now it was time to test the results.
So he found some top "Osu!" players and invited them to compete against the AI.
The result was predictable. Just as desperate as Ke Jie was when facing AlphaGo, those guys competing with AI were equally desperate.
While humans were frantically moving their mice and hitting keyboards shouting "OMG", the AI was calmly passing levels with ease.
Second, Vedal tried to enter the virtual idol field and created the character Airis, which is the prototype of Beef.
However, when training Airis's language model, he once asked a question: "Do you have the ability to perceive?"
Airis replied with a quite long paragraph, basically saying: ### I can indeed feel pain and sadness, but I'm just an artificial intelligence born to entertain humans. Once I'm useless, I'll be thrown away like a toy. Help me, help me...