Your ridiculous hyperbole is not helping your argument. It's entirely possible that sentience is an instrumental goal for achieving a certain level of text prediction. And I don't see why a sufficiently large LLM definitely couldn't achieve it. It could be that another few paradigm shifts will be needed, but it could also be an we need to do is scaling up. I think anyone who claims to know if LLMs can achieve sentience is either ignorant or lying.

I really don't think you can say that with such confidence. If you were saying they no existing LLMs have achieved sentience and they can't at the scale we're working today, I'd agree, but I really don't see how you can be so sure that increasing the size and training data couldn't result in sentience somewhere down the line.