You've misread. I didn't mention existing models. I agree that it is an extraordinary claim that existing models demonstrate anything like AGI or sentience.

I said it was delusional that AI can never be sentient or self-aware. That is also an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, and nobody has any.

People usually mention stochastic parrots and the Chinese room, but their arguments are very obviously flawed:

1. Current gen AI may only seem like a stochastic parrot, but there's no reason to believe that human intelligence isn't just a really fancy stochastic parrot.

2. The Chinese room experiment just confuses things by anthropomorphizing a single part of the whole intelligent system (i.e. saying there's a man in the room). If you look at the room as a whole, then yes it does understand Chinese. Similarly if you go the other way and imagine each of the neurons in a Chinese person was a tiny man following simple instructions, does that mean the Chinese person no longer understands Chinese? No of course not.