The counterpoint to this is always "models work with numerical vectors and we translate those to/from words"
These things feel sentient because they talk like us, but if I told you that I have a machine that takes 1 20k-dimensional vector and turns it into another meaningful 20k-dimensional vector, you definitely wouldn't call that sentience.
These things feel sentient because they talk like us, but if I told you that I have a machine that takes 1 20k-dimensional vector and turns it into another meaningful 20k-dimensional vector, you definitely wouldn't call that sentience.