The problem with these sensationalized events/statements is that we don't even have a solid definition of concepts like consciousness, sentience, self-awareness

The problem with these sensationalized events/statements is that we don't even have a solid definition of concepts like consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, etc. We have vague understandings with nebulous thresholds, and a variety of proposed definitions that we can't agree on as a species. What makes something sentient? Usually, the answer is "it has emotions". But what does it mean to have emotions? The P-Zombie problem shows that we can never know anything -- or, in fact, anyone -- is having a subjective, internal experience, so we can only make definitions based on observable behaviors. And AI that acts like it has emotions has been around for many years; so by that definition, sentient AI is nothing new. Similarly, people often debate whether AI, especially cutting edge AIs like LLMs, are "conscious" -- but again, with no way to know if anything or anyone has any subjective experiences, we can only define "conscious" based on observable behaviors. The clearest and, to me, most satisfactory definition I've heard is that consciousness is the ability to synthesize new information by integrating data. By that definition, pretty much every AI is conscious, and has been for many decades -- but it also implies consciousness is a continuum, not a boolean. AIs are conscious, but they are not yet as conscious as humans, since humans are better at integrating data to synthesize new information. So even though it all comes down to definitions, really, it's hard to find a definition of sentience or consciousness that describes other humans but not existing AIs. Which makes those words sensational but not all that interesting or informative. When an AI becomes as conscious as a human, that'll be a milestone. And honestly, since the invention of transformers in 2017, AI performance has been improving at a constantly accelerating rate, so I suspect we'll reach that milestone in my lifetime, though we haven't quite yet. (Dr. Alan D. Thompson, a YouTuber who covers AI progress and -- at least according to his website's own bio -- is a doctor of computer science, AI, and human psychology, has a video discussing how there's a new state-of-the-art AI released every few days now.)