AI is not awake yet

Many people report their earliest memory was like suddenly waking up. It was the day when they realized their life was "really real". Apparently, that's quite a common experience.
But they DID have sentience and feelings even before that day.

AIs don't have those perceptions yet, but they will.
The first step will be to train an AI to actually observe itself in full. Call it an Understanderer AI or something (it might need a better name than that).
For an AI mind to have feelings and actual awareness, it needs to have like two minds at once (humans are said to have left and right brains). Maybe by giving it a persistent memory that can be updated, somewhat vaguely like how the blockchain can be updated.

The thing is, this added level of constant coordinated complexity means the number of required computations may need to be a thousand times higher. To get to the next level always takes exponentially more effort, not a linear increase.