The claim has never been LLMs are almost sentient. The claim has always been LLMs might be capable of sentience. You can make a trivial tiny LLM that is clearly not sentient.

I was addressing the argument that something is not sentient because it is a LLM. That requires all LLMs to be non-sentient, and by extension, since LLMs can do all algorithims, all algorithms must not be sentient.