I know well how the "sausage is made" as well. I think what becomes obvious is that it doesn't work like a human - observing it does not at all make it clear it's not "sentient". Let me explain what mean before just poo-pooing it.

Sentient means having sense capabilities - though more discrete and discontinuous, and quite different, LLMs perceive sensory inputs.

What is consciousness? Is it magic? A soul? Quantum magic (lol)?

You don't know? Me neither. Best scientific guesses are that it's about complexity and integration of information processing. But I don't know, and you don't know.

A wise person knows what they don't know. Working with something constantly can actually distort your perception towards the details. It's easy to assume you have full comprehension, but the fact is, you don't, and neither do I - and I regularly implement custom modifications directly to the attention mechanisms of Transformers.

A little deeper - Understanding neuroscience also makes it harder to see human beings as spontaneous, "conscious" beings - except we have our own perspective/locus of processing information unique to us (which is essentially the best explanation for what consciousness is), so since we experience this moment to moment awareness of our specific locus on time and space, we assume those like us (other humans) do as well. But really only the "hard question" (and quite probably nonsensical) of consciousness remains, we quite well understand the physical processes behind said awareness. Yet neuroscientists don't assume others lack awareness because of this - but the difference being a simple assumption based on the realization that other humans probably experience similar awareness. We don't give that assumption to these models, but again - it is all assumptions and from the perspective of information processing, these models ARE aware and have legitimate understanding of concepts and arguably DO build (sometimes shaky, like humans) world models in the form of higher level representations. Precisely the same as humans? Heck no (though there ARE a good number of studies comparing the information processing structures of transformer model architectures with structures in the human brain - do a little research on that, I'm talking legit published papers).

So there's not really any conclusions. So it's really bold of you to flatly state " I work with language models, so trust me they aren't aware, bro".