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A Microsoft researcher built a goat-powered LLM in Age of Empires II to prove it's not sentient
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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There's fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly's, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly's brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don't think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There's no obvious reason we can't scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
I'll believe it when it happens. There's a huge different between simulating 139,000 neurons and 50 billion neurons.
Besides, the authors looked at taste and touch sensory. That's not exactly predicting the entire behavior of a fly, and the authors (of which there were many), admitted they don't know if it can actually predict neural activity. Source
I'm not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don't need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I've read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly's brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
The difference of scale is in the grey area of the difference of scale of quantum and classical mechanics, though. Conciousness very much could be something that depends on the emergent properties of quantum mechanics and doesn't reach classical mechanics.