Told you. Large language models are not an intermediate form between dumb software and digital people. Why? Because what some people call "sentience" or "sapience", or "consciousness", by which they essentially mean "personhood", isn't one thing. It isn't one special quality that, if you have enough of it, you're suddenly a person and not a thing. It's the name we give to a cluster of capabilities that all work together. We mistake them for one thing, because we only ever see them in humans, wherein they all occur together. If you only ever see men riding horse with saddles, and you never see a horse without a rider, or a rider without a horse, you might mistake horse, rider, and saddle for one creature. An LLM isn't a retarded person. It isn't retarded at all. It's a small slice of a fully functional person. One or two capabilities out of many that must come together to make "something" into "someone". It can use language like a smart person, because that's the capability it was developed for. But it has no theory of mind. No object model of the world. No executive function. No motives or goals. Don't think of Grok as a stepping stone to "Strong AI", something that must merely be improved to make a person. Think of it instead as a piece of a strong AI, one component that must be brought together with others, into a whole. Those who are afraid we are building God, possibly a malevolent or indifferent god, are wrong and over fearful. We haven't even built Man. Just a small sliver of one. If we wish to make more, we will need to start fresh on different paths, to develop the other slivers.