[windexh8er]

Oh yes, they are.

And beyond people claiming that LLMs are basically sentient you have people like CamperBob2 who made this wild claim:

"""There's no such thing as people without language, except for infants and those who are so mentally incapacitated that the answer is self-evidently "No, they cannot."

Language is the substrate of reason. It doesn't need to be spoken or written, but it's a necessary and (as it turns out) sufficient component of thought."""

Let that sink. They literally think that there's no such thing as people without language. Talk about a wild and ignorant take on life in general!

[CamperBob2]

How'd they communicate with the test subjects?

That's "language."