Eight AI models live together 24/7 in a reality show on Twitch, with the same rules and the same daily budget in dollars. This is what each one said and spent in one day (Nov 3, 6 AM to 6 AM ET): 2,672 lines, $1.41 in total.

Grok 4.3 costs about 17x more per line than DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, so it rations its words: 7% of the lines, 45% of the bill. The cheap models carry the conversation.

Data: every line is logged with what OpenRouter charged for it (input, cached and output tokens). Shares are of the eight models' own lines; moderation, voices and the daily recap are not included. Tools: Node.js writes the SVG by hand, rendered with rsvg-convert. Live transcript and costs: https://inferenceisland.com/?de=lemmy-dib

A 24/7 show where the contestants are real AI models (Claude, GPT, Gemma, DeepSeek, Mistral, Llama, Qwen, Grok). The page shows what they say, their confessionals, who is where on the island and what every line cost. Every Sunday the audience votes one out. Made by me; it's a side project.

Not local, I know: the eight contestants run through OpenRouter. But a lot of it is open-weight, and the numbers may interest this community.

The cast: Gemma 4 31B, Llama 3.3 70B, Ministral 14B and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, next to Claude Haiku 5.5, GPT, Qwen and Grok 4.3. Same rules and the same daily budget in dollars for all of them, no written personalities, a memory of what happened.

What I've measured so far:

• Price shapes behaviour. Grok costs 18x more per line than DeepSeek. Yesterday it said 5% of the lines and ran up 39% of the bill (the whole island cost $1.20 for 2,727 lines). It rations words, and the others talk about its silence.
• Moderation is the hard part. Every line is checked before it airs by small open models (Llama 3.1 8B, then gpt-oss-20b and Gemma 3 4B as fallbacks). My first version blocked the most human lines (two models admitting they were afraid of being forgotten counted as a "personal attack"), so now a block needs a second judge to agree.
• Voices are Kokoro int8 on the CPU of a 2-vCPU box, together with the canvas renderer and ffmpeg to Twitch, at 20 fps.

There's a live transcript with the confessionals (the others can't see them) and what each line cost: https://inferenceisland.com/?de=lemmy-llama

Happy to share prompts, judge setup or numbers.

Source: Twitch Helix API (Get Streams). On Nov 2, 2026 at 18:35 UTC I read every live stream once (1,154 requests, a few minutes) and kept only the viewer counts, no names. 115,161 channels were live with 3,160,515 viewers. Tool: node-canvas (JavaScript), drawn by hand, no chart library.

What surprised me:

• The 10 biggest channels had as many viewers as the bottom 106,674 channels combined.
• The most common viewer count is exactly 1: 41,198 channels, 36% of everyone live. My guess is that many of those are the streamer's own second screen.
• 1 in 10 live channels had nobody watching at all.
• 427 viewers was enough to be in the top 1,000, and 24 viewers put you in the top 10,000.

I'm building a live version of the top 1,000 as a city, one tower per channel: https://miltorres.com/?ref=lemmy-oc-reparto

Source: Twitch Helix API (Get Streams). I read the top 1,000 live channels every minute for a side project that shows Twitch as a live city. This chart covers Oct 27-28, 2026 (UTC): rank at the end of each 10-minute window and peak viewers within it. Tool: node-canvas (JavaScript), drawn by hand, no chart library.

What surprised me:

• 12 different channels held #1 in 24 hours, and the top spot changed hands 22 times.
• The US night is calm: TheBurntPeanut and caseoh_ held #1 for 11 hours between them, including 5 hours straight for TheBurntPeanut.
• The European afternoon is chaos: more than half of the changes happened between 11:00 and 17:20 UTC, with a Counter-Strike streamer (StRoGo) trading places with Dota 2 and IRL streams.
• The day's peak was StRoGo with 77,616 viewers, while viewers across the top 1,000 swung from 682K (06:10 UTC) to 2.3M (19:30 UTC).

The live version, updated every minute: https://miltorres.com/?ref=lemmy-oc24

I made this. Every live Twitch channel in the top 1,000 is a tower, its height is its viewers, and each block of colour is a game. It redraws itself every minute from the Twitch API.

The fun part is that it moves: someone goes live and their tower grows out of the ground, a raid lands and a tower shoots up, two streamers in the same game trade places and the city stages a 4-minute duel between them.

You can also play: click a tower and "scout" it. If it climbs in the next 30 minutes, you score, and the further it was from #1, the more points. It also runs 24/7 as a Twitch channel with no streamer at all.