Developing
video games is an extremely expensive process, but what just happened to the
creators of Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail is
on another level of absurdity. It turns out that miHoYo wasted
close to $300,000 in just thirteen hours due to a technical oversight. It was
not an external hack or a legal claim, but a group of artificial
intelligence programs that stayed talking to each other all night
without supervision, generating a gigantic bill that has become the topic of
conversation in the industry.
The story
was revealed by Zheng Yinhe, head of the Honkai franchise's artificial
character technology team, during his participation in the Alibaba Cloud Summit
technology conference. He explained that one of the company's programmers set
up several artificial intelligences to automatically collaborate on an internal
project. The original plan was for one machine to create the content, another
to review it, and a third to provide suggestions, correcting each other in an
automated way. The problem arose when the system went into a vicious cycle
without an exit order, spending the entire night answering each other in a kind
of endless virtual meeting.
When miHoYo employees
returned to the offices the next morning and stopped the process, the
processing token account had already reached two million yuan. Reviewing the
outcome of those thirteen hours of digital debate, they discovered that the
material generated was useless, replete with contradictions and completely
fabricated data that these systems produce when operating outside their
established boundaries. Despite the financial loss, managers decided to take on
this expense as a necessary learning fee to better understand the risks of
automating the development of their next video games.
Massive
investment geared towards the future of development
This
incident coincides with the company's recent announcements to expand its
technological capacity. Just days before the event, Honkai's parent
company, Star Rail, confirmed a historic investment of approximately $15
billion over the next three years, focused exclusively on the design of
automated software tools. The ultimate goal of this huge budget is to create
advanced gameplay mechanics and design characters with much more realistic and
personalized behaviors in their future open worlds.
Despite the
skepticism that these tools generate in a sector of the gaming community, the
company maintains its stance of continuing to experiment on a large scale. It
is clear that the use of these technologies requires constant human vigilance
to prevent operating costs from skyrocketing in a matter of hours
