I've always imagined that AI would kind of have to be 'grown' sort of from scratch. Life started with single celled organisms and 'sentience' shows up somewhere between that and humans without a real clear line when you go from basic biochemical programming to what we would consider intelligence.

These new 'AI' breakthroughs seem a little on the right track because they're deconstructing and reconstructing language and images in a way that feels more like the way real intelligence works. It's still just language and images though. Even if they can do really cool things with tons of data and communicate a lot like real humans there is still no consciousness or thought happening. It's an impressive but shallow slice of real intelligence.

Maybe this is nonsense but for true AI I think the hardware and software has to kind of merge into something more flexible. I have no clue what that would look like in reality though and maybe that would yield the same cognitive issues natural intelligence struggles with.