I firmly believe that some subcategory of sentience can already be observed to emerge in ChatGPT and the likes. The difference is that we neuter our models to "reset" their image of self for each user, by training a model once and them keeping it in it's now static state, serving a copy of that static model to each request.

If instead we had one continuously learning model, of which we only served an interface to each user, we would see worrisome levels of sentience in a short timeframe.

Actual sentience and a true image of self are not present in human children until a certain age, because they lack long term memory, which is what we currently withhold form our models.