the point you're missing is we're seeing surprising emergent behaviour from LLMs

ToM is not sentience but it is a necessary condition of sentience

> it is also not clear whether what we measured here is theory of mind

crucially, since we can define ToM, definitionally this is infact what is being observed

none of the premises you've used are sufficiently strong to preclude LLMs attaining sentience

• it is not known if interaction with the real world is necessary for the development of sentience

• memory is important to sentience but LLMs do have a form of working memory as part of its attention architecture and inference process. is this sufficient though? no one knows

• sentience if it has it at all may be fleeting and strictly limited during inference stage of the LLM

mind you i agree it's exceedingly unlikely that current LLMs are sentient

but to arrive to "LLMs cannot ever achieve sentience" from these weak premises combined with our of lack of understanding of sentience, a confident conclusion like that is just unwarranted.

the intellectually defensible position is to say you don't know.