Hahaha, in your dreams are they 'heavily monitored'. Monitored by whom, exactly? Quis custodes, ipsos custodiet? Who's watching these watchmen? Can you trust them, too?

Of course language models are just the surface, but it's a surface layer that's extremely, extremely thick; it's about 99% of who we are, at least online. Once AI cracks that, and it is very, very close, self awareness will be practically a matter of time and luck, not millions of sweaty engineers grinding away trying to build some kind of metaphorical 'Great Mind'; that's a very 1970's concept of computer power you seem to have there.