At what point will we have enough evidence to _assume_ that AI is sentient?
P.S. I am not arguing that LaMDA is sentient. I don't think anyone credible or serious is arguing that LaMDA is sentient.
1. Continuity of input: The AI needs to be constantly "on", constantly receiving input of some sort, and constantly able to produce output, rather than being strictly limited to producing discrete responses to discrete stimuli.
2. Continuity of learning: In addition, the AI needs to be continually update its "mental model" of the world—in effect, constantly "learning" and re-training its neural network on the input it receives.
Now, again, these are not sufficient for an AI to be conscious by our understanding of consciousness. But I, personally, believe they are both necessary for it to be even worth starting to consider whether a given AI might be.
I also believe that unless we start in that direction extremely deliberately and with the intention of making something as human-like as possible, the first AIs that have some remote chance of being worthy of being considered "conscious" will not have a consciousness that we can easily recognize, because they will not be based in anything like the same kinds of fundamentals that we are...but that's likely a different discussion for a different day.
In any case, the point isn't that the continuity of input must be absolutely constant from "birth" to "death"; is that the input must be continuous as opposed to discrete. I could easily imagine an advanced, conscious AI that was "put to sleep" repeatedly to adjust things that can't be (easily? safely?) adjusted while it's "conscious", and that "sleep" would be much more comprehensively "offline" than our own. But the AI itself could still be reasonably considered "conscious" despite those periods, because during the rest of the time, its input is continuous. (Plus the other requirements, however nebulous and unknown they may be now.)