I have mixed feelings about this paper. On the one hand, I'm a big fan of studying how strategies evolve in these sorts of games. Examining the conditions that

I have mixed feelings about this paper. On the one hand, I'm a big fan of studying how strategies evolve in these sorts of games. Examining the conditions that determine how cooperation arises and survives is interesting in its own right. However, I think that the paper tries to frame these experiments in way that is often unjustified. Cultural evolution is LLMs will often be transient - any acquired behavior will disappear once the previous interactions are removed from the model's input. Transmission, one of the conditions they identify for evolution, is often unsatisfied. >Notwithstanding these limitations, our experiments do serve to falsify the claim that LLMs are universally capable of evolving human-like cooperative behavior. I don't buy this framing at all. We don't know what behavior humans would produce if placed in the same setting.