Everybody already knows that code running on a computer cannot become sentient. I don't know why this is interesting. Someone said a dumb thing, breached their contract, and got fired for it. The end.
That sounds pretty confident considering we don't even know how sentience works or emerges.
Aside from that I agree this specific story isn't particularly interesting, though. The media hyped it up to an insane degree.
This works better the other way, no?
- "The code has become sentient!”
-- "Define sentient..."
sound of crickets
Edit: Actually, I suppose it wouldn't be the sound of crickets, but the sound of a thousand idiots regurgitating the last YouTube video they watched on the subject, but the informational content is the same.
If you could prove that, you'd win a Turing Award.
We have no agreed-upon definition of what sentience even is, nor what causes humans to experience it, so this is clearly not true.
This is very much not "known". Some people believe it, but nobody knows.