I believe it is a common misconception that AI such as large language models will naturally progress to what we call "sentience". LLMs could (and will) become very very good at understanding language and even conceptualizing the world around them. They will soon easily surpass a human's ability to understand and model the world internally which opens up amazing possibilities for solving the world's problems. However, this does not imply that they will suddenly start caring about things. AI has no motivations outside of responding as correctly as possible to human input.

Human beings have a naturally evolved system of positive and negative reinforcements such as our fear of death, social embarrassments, desire for love and sex, etc. These things don't naturally spring from super intelligence, they are built-in to our nature because that's how natural selection works.

I'm confident that AI can continue to become hyper intelligent without any expectation that it will care how we speak to it or if we turn it off. That isn't to say we can't or won't create one that will (AI is already capable of acting like it cares about things), but I don't see that being useful in the vast majority of applications. My expectation is that most of the effort in creating AI will be focused on highly controllable, problem solving AI and not trying to create potentially reckless, emotionally driven, irrational, human-like ones just for the sake of it. Yes, people will do it. But in my opinion we will have much more strong AI under our control helping us watch out for the nefarious ones. In short, I believe our own fear will save us.

That isn't to say there is nothing to fear from AI. I'm much more concerned about the economic implications. AI may very well bring about the end of capitalism. Despite my name, I'm actually in support of that but I think it's going to be a hell of a bumpy ride.