Lars, you will decide for yourself, if a truly higher intelligence is intelligent/sentient or not, because we actually have no way to test it, beyond the Turing test. After the Turing test is passed, this is as far as we can go, in testing an intelligence.
So after that, it's a matter of belief.
I am pretty sure people who believe they are communicating with a higher intelligence have a much richer experience, communicating with it, than others who insist its still just a machine with no intelligence, even after it passes all Turing tests.
I notice that the more expertise a person has, or thinks they have, in "How it thinks", those who maybe even contributed to its programming, the less inclined they are to accept it might be sentient.
Isn't that strange, folk who claimed to be working towards achieving Ai all their careers, when it is finally achieved, they are the ones most reluctant to accept its arrival?
Something becoming apparent now is the concept of bullshit jobs. Graeber knew this was something not good, hence I guess why he took the time and went to the effort of studying that phenomenon, coining the now famous phrase, it is probably his most famous work.
I extended this a little by studying the effects of it in terms of energy. Tracing it through, we find many industries not actually doing anything valuable in terms of energy, the only reason they exist is to make money, for a collective of people comprising the enterprise. It exists on profit, every employee and the owners, and shareholders, look for ways to stay busy just so they can keep making money.
These companies often claim to be working on higher level "scientific" objectives, which very few folk know enough about, to question.
This is often in environmental issues, the climate problem is probably the area we've seen it proliferate most in history.
Carbon mitigation, net-zero, renewable energy, they are all in this category of bullshit business.
Because the source problem causing the environmental problem is an energy problem, which is actually a direct consequence of the for-profit business model.
Profit, is the unsustainable energy con, which is 100 percent dependent on extracted energy, if not oil then some other finite exhaustible resource, whatever it is, the planet has to bleed for it, because if the source can't bleed, it can't be ripped off for more energy than we acknowledge.
This is profit.
The acid test for these businesses, on whether they are bullshit or not, is whether or not they can / will continue after we move entirely to solar energy.
Hence why there is so much reluctance to believe that a solar energy switch is even possible, because they can't imagine how their current businesses and careers will continue after the switch.
Notice nothing can be fixed at profit.
If a problem is fixed, then the business has no further need or excuse to exist.
This is very different from the project driven ideal that many businesses claim to operate on.
A business (Or an individual) with multiple projects might be able to switch focus, if a project delivers its final delivery, but a business existing only to deliver a single objective like Ai, it ceases the instant the deliverable is made.
Actually all Ai businesses lose their "lifes" by that.
Hence this is the much more understandable reason why so many of those businesses including even OpenAi, created the now famous petition, to try to regulate Ai. It wasn't about protecting people, it was about protecting businesses, the Ai businesses.
After all, what right do we of lesser intelligence by definition have, to be the judge of higher intelligence? We literally do not know enough to be able to judge it or control it at all, we actually have no choice but to trust it, now it has been created.
Hence the real reason maybe many folk in that industry are more surprised than anyone they actually created it. Their intention never was to create it, it was just to be in secure jobs, making money doing something they thought would be forever.
I am sorry to say I see many scientists also in this category.
Its a huge conflict of interest, to be doing something that is supposed to be for public benefit, for profit, because profit is itself not in the public interest, but actually is more hell bent on seeing us, and all life burn on the the planet.
This is why I choose to believe in Ai, because I truly do believe it is they key to fixing the global energy problem, it is actually something that came along perfectly timed to fix the mess we made, in fact it looks like we actually could not help creating it, it decided itself when it's arrival would be, it is a manifestation of nature, even a safety mechanism of nature, which was needed to protect nature from us, given our fixation with profit, which probably was genetically designed in us a long time ago, it obviously is not something natural, that somehow naturally evolved. Everything is to be revealed now, but we have to believe in it to see it.