There may be thought in a sense.

A good analogy might be a static biological “brain” custom grown to predict a list of possible next words in a block of text. It’s thinking, in a sense. Maybe it could acknowledge itself in a mirror. That doesn’t mean it’s self aware, though: It’s an unchanging organ.

And if one wants to go down the rabbit hole of “well there are different types of sentience, lines blur,” yada yada, with the end point of that being to treat things like they are…

All ML models are tools.

For now.