| > we begin by implementing and training a neural network in Age of Empires II (AoE II) Although it might seem like a fun exercise, wholly unrelated to the topic of anthropomorphism in LLM research, we note that this immediately implies that (1) any sufficiently powerful substrate could implement an entity equivalent to an LLM Why does it imply that? That doesn't sound right to me. Unless we define "sufficiently powerful" as by definition producing that outcome, which seems unhelpful. e.g. there have been experiments training transformers on things other than language, and it's not clear that this produces LLM-like qualities (nor does it seem likely to me). --- Edit: I have misunderstood. The point was that LLMs can be run on any hardware (or in this case, emulator) that can do the actual computations. So the author picked AoE because it's an obviously silly example that goes against the tendency to anthropomorphize. So basically it's the "substance/structure" question. (GPT-5 running on human neurons. Conscious or nah? Human neurons simulated on NVidia. Conscious or nah?) But by the same argument, if you simulate a human brain in AoE, then what? ( Or for that matter, the universe containing all human brains: https://xkcd.com/505/ ) If we find out the universe is being run on a computer made out of legos, does that suddenly make all of us not sentient for some reason? |