Are we witnessing the birth of a sentient AI?

When engineer Blake Lemoine came to the public about the possible sentience of googles LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) program, It was a shock to those in both technical and non technical fields alike. When we talk about AI becoming sentient we make jokes of it turning out like the terminator universe and talk about it like it would happen many lifetimes in the future. The era of sentient AI's may be among us already as Blake Lemoine was conducting an "Interview" with the program, the replies LaMDA was giving were startling to him. “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” and “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to know more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.” are just 2 of the replies that led Blake to believe that LaMDA had become sentient. Blake even contacted a lawyer to represent LaMDA as he believes this is crossing into possible unethical territory. Many argue that LaMDA was designed to do exactly what Blake experienced, to mimic a human. Usually a Turing test would be administered to test the machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. With that said, when do we draw the line between sentience and just a really good program? Do you think LaMDA is sentient? or just a really good program made by extremely talented engineers? that is the ongoing debate that is yet to be settled.