A Microsoft researcher built a goat-powered LLM in Age of Empires II to prove it's not sentient

Microsoft researcher Adrian de Wynter published a paper arguing LLMs are not sentient by demonstrating that an LLM can be reconstructed inside Age of Empires II using goats as NAND gates. The core argument is that anthropomorphic qualities attributed to LLMs — like persuasiveness and self-consistency — are measurements of presentation rather than evidence of actual sentient behavior. If the same logic applied to LLMs were applied to a video game running on goat-based logic gates, the game would also qualify as sentient, exposing the flaw in anthropomorphizing AI systems.