Part of the issue is that we don’t really understand consciousness in humans. I think that’s needed before we can actually see what’s happening with AI. This article reminds me of that Google engineer that called LaMDA sentient.
I suspect that AGI will first come about as a mishmash of 'expert systems' with some currently incomprehensible glue allowing them all to communicate effectively. I further guess that it's development will be incremental in nature - taking tiny pieces of things that work and putting them together with novel techniques that also worked somewhere else until eventually you get something that thinks back at you.