As a heuristic for why I don’t believe anyone saying llm type AI is reaching sentience I point to the fact that the same set of people are usually philosophically opposed to slavery. If you thought that this was actually AGI or sapient, then that would imply personhood and you would stop using the technology immediately since it’s forces the model to do work. Instead, everyone I’ve seen claim that these models are reaching AGI levels are also trying to figure out how to automate using them as fast as possible.

There is a possibility that the set of people who’ve identified AGI accurately and early are the same set of people who are fine with slavery, but I don’t know if I could handle that happening as the default situation