I am a software engineer. I deal with LLMs and their implementation every day. I'm not a specialist, but I have a good enough idea of how they work. Their core functionality is fundamentally no different than the predictive text function on your phone. Even setting aside the fact that sentience is a complex and ill-defined concept, certainly you can agree that your autocorrect is nowhere in the realm of sentient.

Not the OP, but any software developer who has spent some time with the inner workings of LLMs can tell you that. Open weight models are a good opportunity to explore how LLMs work on the inside and to experiment with them a lot more than you can do with the so called Frontier models. The technology however is the same. These are just very fancy statistical prediction machines, and the reason why you are so impressed with them is that the statistical average of what sounds reasonable in a conversation is exactly what people expect to hear on average, given a specific context. It's a neat little trick that works only only as long as the context fits (contentwise and spacewise), and once you realize that you'll see LLMs as what they truly are. There is no magic, and the "intelligence" is the intelligence of the people who built those systems, the systems themselves are not intelligent in any commonly used sense of the word.