The Importance of Conceptualization

Blake Jordon wrote an internal memo to Google leadership in which he said, I think this AI is sentient. And the leadership in Google felt that this was an entirely unsubstantiated claim. So they made the decision to fire him for what they took as an inappropriate conclusion. How do we know whether the AI is sentient or instead whether humans are fooling themselves into believing that it is? Well, one way to make this distinction would be to see if the AI could conceptualize things.