We aren't quite there yet on sentience with released models. Maybe in the labs but that's one of the criteria. We are very close though.
Kind of like how we could have ran Qwen 3.8 27B 20 years ago on an expensive computer. The technology to make it happen, assuming you knew exactly what was required, existed back then.
What are you basing this on? Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?
It does feel like people just like adding additional hype for the sake of being in on the hype. Fomo, pushed by oligarchs who would push their mother off a bridge for a trillion dollar IPO.
There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.
On that subject, this recent commentary by three big name neuroscientists may be of interest:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03313-7
There remains a vast amount of difference between a biological brain and an LLM neural network. The "it's big enough, so consciousness just happens" argument is not supported by any actual evidence that I know of.
It's obvious a LLM can do anything a computer can do.
As an answer to "Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?"
It is because that would mean that no algorithm could exhibit sentience, claiming that would require some causal action that cannot be performed by an algorithm to create sentience. Some people like to point to quantum effects, but that would require the cause of sentience to be pure randomness. That seems even less plausible. Absent of any evidence that human brains are doing something that no algorithm could do, it would be reasonable to assume that sentience could be algorithmically obtained.
We've had computers that can do anything computers can do for as long as we've had computers.
I was addressing the argument that something is not sentient because it is a LLM. That requires all LLMs to be non-sentient, and by extension, since LLMs can do all algorithims, all algorithms must not be sentient.
Seems like the claim is that they're almost there. Anyways, have a nice day, and Happy Halloween if you celebrate.
Obviously claims of the future are going to be speculative.
I don't think anyone credible is claiming to know the extent to which models that exist today are sentient. People have stated their opinions on what they might be.
There are a few non serious claims, but I'm not hedging too much with the conditional of credible. There's probably someone out there who would claim LLMs are made of milk. I'm limiting credible to researchers in the field, who have divergent beliefs on what might be happening, but are generally in agreement of what we know is happening.
They follow a probability, so you can simulate a universe that is compatible with the same rules and get a different result. This is essentially one of the arguments for a many worlds theory.
Ultra precise simulation like that isn't in any case necessary, after all humans can create humans without needing 40 digit decimal places. Or create cars or computers etc without simulating everything down to each electron.