Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we didn't have the theory or the models, there was no path forward and so it was impossible to predict. Now we have a fairly concrete idea of what a potential AGI might look like - an RL agent that uses a large transformer. Who is we exactly? As someone working in AI research I know no one that would agree with this statement, so im quite puzzled by that statement.
Fellow AI researcher here who personal agrees with OP, there are some of us that are believers ;). I agree that most people in our industry are generally not very bullish about near-term AGI, I think it just comes down to how you perceive the complexity of the problem. Personally, I think it's solvable because passing a lengthy, adversarial Turing test reliably is all it would take to convince me of sentience in a mo…
I would define sentience as an awareness of oneself in relation to one's environment, that generalizes to different aspects of self and environment (eg. social, physical etc)
One of the key aspects of intelligence is learning from 3rd-person perspectives - eg. you observe another ape hunting with a stick, and decide to emulate that behavior for yourself. This seemingly simple behavior requires a lot of work, you have to recognize other apes as agents similar to yourself, then map their actions to your own body, then perform those actions and see if it had the intended outcome.
Current RL agents are not capable of this. The data used for GATO and similar agents for imitation learning are in first person perspective. If an agent could learn from a 3rd person perspective, via direct observations of its environment, I would say that would be the beginning of machine sentience.