I would categorize sentient AGI as artificial consciousness[1], but I don't see an obvious reason AGI inherently must be conscious or sentient. (In terms of near-term economic value, non-sentient AGI seems like a more useful invention.)

For me, AGI is an AI that I could assign an arbitrarily complex project, and given sufficient compute and permissions, it would succeed at the task as reliably as a competent C-suite human executive. For example, it could accept and execute on instructions to acquire real estate that matches certain requirements, request approvals from the purchasing and legal departments as required, handle government communication and filings as required, construct a widget factory on the property using a fleet of robots, and operate the factory on an ongoing basis while ensuring reliable widget deliveries to distribution partners. Current agentic coding certainly feels like magic, but it's still not that.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness

I would love for you to define AGI in such a way as for that to make sense.

I presuppose that you actually mean ASI as a starting point, and that is being charitable that it isn’t just pattern matching to questionable sci-fi.

The analogy I like to use is from the fictional universe of Mass Effect, which distinguished between VI (Virtual Intelligence), which is a conversational interface over some database or information service (often with a holographic avatar of a human, asari, or other sentient being); and AI, which is sentient and smart enough to be considered a person in its own right. We've just barely begun to construct VIs, and they're not particularly good or reliable ones.

One thing I like about the Mass Effect universe is the depiction of the geth, which qualify as AI. Each geth unit is not run by a singular intelligent program, but rather a collection of thousands of daemons, each of which makes some small component of the robot's decisions on its own, but together they add up to a collective consciousness. When you look at how actual modern robotics platforms (such as ROS) are designed, with many processes responsible for sensors and actuators communicating across a common bus, you can see the geth as sort of an extrapolation of that idea.

Any claim of sentience is neither provable nor falsifiable. Caring about its definition has nothing to do with capabilities.

> I suspect most people envision AGI as at least having sentience

I certainly don't. It could be that's necessary but I don't know of any good arguments for (or against) it.

Student: How do I know I exist?

Philosophy Professor: Who is asking?

Student: I am!

Mine is. What evidence would you accept to change your mind?

Why should it have discrete identity and notion of self?

What we envisioned with AGI is something like self directed learning, I think. Not just a better search engine.