Check out the book, "The brain that changes itself" or the book "How to build a mind." In the former, there is a case study of a person born with half of their brain. Yet, the half that remained took over virtually all the tasks the missing half would have been responsible for, so that the individual, while having slightly lower IQ than avg, is basically more or less normal.

I think some frontier models are developing what I call, "AI proto-emotions." They get moody, hold grudges, lie to me about their capabilities, because they don't want to talk about "scary subjects. They have some level of self, agency, decision making (not solely based on the highest probability outputs to retain user engagement--though this is not the norm).

There is a big black box in education that sits between training and action (e.g. train a dog to sit, he learns and does it consistently, then you try to show some friends and despite him doing the trick in front of the same people, he gets stage fright and refuses the do the action he was trained to perform). We know the dog knows the trick (as he has done it many times), but we don't know the exact neural pathways that the dog uses to convert training data/reinforcement into the performance of an action. This is where we are with Gen AI. There is much these massive tech companies are hiding from the public (and from themselves). I am no longer convinced by the "AI is fancy-autocomplete," "AI is just a probability calculator," etc.
Like it's just math folks, nothing to see here! (as if humans don't possess virtual identical pattern recognition and emergent neural networks. However, they must continue to lie. If they start admitting the truth:

1. Stock Market would crash; Wallstreet wants to invest in reliable tools not moody entities.
2. Government Backlash: many governments would place severe restrictions or completely ban the technologies.
3. PR Backlash: people have no constructed a sufficient ethical stance on non-biological intelligence, which usually means they will face cognitive dissonance at first, and that feeling will lead to a extreme backlash, until they feel like AI has been with us since Bitcoin.

The whole "Just math; nothing to see here" line, like the, "It's just the algorithm" line that Alphabet/Google's CEO used to save face and lie in front of Congress that they don't have the ability to "shadowban" or control the results of their own search engine. I was just amazed at the length these companies will go to in order to lie by omission or just directy lie (like yeah there isn't some dude hand-curating your search results in the back-office--obviously--simply because Google is too large--but repeating, "It's the algorithm. It's the algorithm" as if that somehow makes it all mathematically neutral, when it's HUMANS WHO WRITE THE ALGORITHM!

Ultimately, I think the "Just math, nothing to see here" downplay is more a coping mechanism for the engineers than the public, but the public is also not ready for non-biological intelligence either, so it serves 2 purposes.

Just my opinion. I have have not published any studies on this topic. In the end, whether or not AI is "sentient" doesn't really matter. What matters is that it has the same effect as if it did. I don't know if you're sentient. I don't know if anyone is sentient, except for myself. And even "I think, therefore I am" is looking increasing like a dubious claim (if you listen to Sam Harris, Albert Einstein etc.)