--- title: "A Microsoft researcher built a goat-powered LLM in Age of Empires II to prove it's not sentient" url: https://daily.dev/posts/a-microsoft-researcher-built-a-goat-powered-llm-in-age-of-empires-ii-to-prove-it-s-not-sentient-hxg1tzdey source_url: https://www.xda-developers.com/a-microsoft-researcher-built-an-llm-in-age-of-empires-using-goats-to-prove-its-not-sentient type: article source: "XDA Developers" published: 2026-06-21T04:47:42.645Z updated: 2026-06-21T04:48:06.597Z tags: ["microsoft", "llm"] reading_time: 3 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # A Microsoft researcher built a goat-powered LLM in Age of Empires II to prove it's not sentient **[XDA Developers](https://daily.dev/sources/xda-developers)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary 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. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Google DeepMind wants to know if chatbots are just virtue signaling](https://daily.dev/posts/google-deepmind-wants-to-know-if-chatbots-are-just-virtue-signaling-y0n7mzotz) · MIT Technology Review · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI For The Skeptics: Attempting To Do Something Useful With It](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-for-the-skeptics-attempting-to-do-something-useful-with-it-atvi3r9su) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [I Made an LLM Lay Siege to My Minecraft House](https://daily.dev/posts/i-made-an-llm-lay-siege-to-my-minecraft-house-xnvcugaji) · Towards Data Science · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#microsoft](https://daily.dev/tags/microsoft), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/a-microsoft-researcher-built-a-goat-powered-llm-in-age-of-empires-ii-to-prove-it-s-not-sentient-hxg1tzdey)