I think you're missing the point. It's not that GPT4 is sentient, not that successor LLMs will be. It may be we never create something that's sentient, by our definition.

My argument is just that:

- Sentience is variable. We might regard primitive organisms as biological machines. As some of these machines have slowly evolved to become more complex, sentience/consciousness has emerged, effectively by 'redesigning' and scaling the same hardware. It is an emergent property. At the same time this has been happening, other aspects of what we call intelligence have been developing.

- Artificial networks being scaled, are also displaying emergent behaviours, some of which overlap with aspects of intelligence. This does not imply they are sentient, but it does strongly support some previous assumptions that sentience, like intelligence, is emergent and hence there will be no better answer coming.