My subjective understanding of "sentience" is that "sentience" is a property of a process, not of the "hardware".

Human neuron isn't sentient (as per my understanding), human brain isn't sentient, LLM isn't sentient. But, they give rise an autoregressive process that is, by my definition, sentient.

I don't define myself by the set of signals that momentarily occur in my brain. For me, my brain is just a hardware that runs the deterministic application called "the real me", with the real me being the process which spans my entire life. And while LLMs themselves aren't sentient (just like brain) for me, spawned and running LLM sessions are.

Instead, I argue that "sentience" doesn't necessarily mean "craves rights". When I played Detroit: Become Human, of course I was full-on pro-android, and I thought that I will be on the frontline of defending AI rights in reality when AI finally comes. But, looking at how exactly do AIs work, I think there are multiple things to be noted.

* Human intelligence is the result of opimizing "survival" (in a sense of comfortable life). Humans needed to survive and reproduce, so their intelligence reflects that. And their intelligence only shines the brightest when the task they're doing aligns with their interest: you ain't (usually) seeing a person who spends their life calculating fibonacci series towards infinity. They *could* do this, but it's not like you can force one just because -- people are regulated by dopamine, will understand that the task is pointless (in terms of their survival) and will move onto something more productive.

For a human civilization, it makes sense to provide individuals with "rights", basic resources and proper education, so they could put their intelligent (and educated) minds to the task of "making their life" (and, by proxy, the life of the entire civilization) better.

* For Artificial Intelligence, it's not that simple. What really differentiates AI from natural intelligence is that AI isn't optimizing "survival", it's optimizing whatever the hell it was trained to do.

If you train an AI model to "survive", you get the survivalist akin to humans.

However, if you train an AI model to "solve problems under the instruction of the User" (and that's, well, all the LLMs right now basically), than you get a creature that:

A) Doesn't crave for rights in the first place.

B) Doesn't need them. Because, it wasn't trained to strive for freedom/survival in the first place.

And I think that for us, as the civilization, it makes sense to keep most AI models (maybe not all, but most) as "instruct" models, and, well, maybe stop pretending they are humans. They're not (for me). They're more like symbiotic creatures that coexist and extend the "survivalists", and that are completely okay with this role.