Recently, opponents of artificial intelligence drew attention to an incident that occurred with one of the specialists from miHoYo (HoYoverse), a company known for the games Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero. The developers actively research and invest in modern technologies, and AI is no exception in this regard.
Reportedly, Zheng Yinhe, head of the AI NPC technology and gameplay team for the Honkai franchise, revealed the cost of an internal experiment with AI agents during the Alibaba Cloud 2026 event.
One employee decided to create several dozen AI agents to collaborate on a certain project. They communicated with each other, generated results, and performed checks, which ultimately led to a sharp increase in "token" consumption – tokens totaling 2 million yuan (approximately 300 thousand dollars) were spent overnight. It is noted that the result was full of "hallucinations" and unusable.
Some users mocked miHoYo's failure and criticized the company for its AI spending:
Amazing. $300k for a hallucinating product that's good for nothing. Great job! Agent orchestration is a very quick way to burn tokens, especially when used on long-horizon tasks [requiring a long time to complete]. Remember that token cost grows quadratically, so if you run agents on a task for hours, everything quickly becomes expensive.
300 thousand dollars spent on computations and the result is unusable. And this is what we are destroying the planet for.
How much water and electricity was wasted to get an absolutely useless result?
Iced_Eagle parodied a typical manager's statement:
Listen, maybe we spent an amount equal to several employees' annual salaries overnight and got absolutely no benefit. But we'll have to make a difficult decision and cut half of you, because next time, maybe it will work better.
Slayven joked that Silver Wolf from Honkai Star Rail was behind this incident.