> Clearly there's a difference, because the architectures we have don't know how to persist information or further train. Without persistence outside of the context window, they can't even maintain a dynamic, stable higher level goal.

Nope, and not all people can achieve this as well. Would you call them less than humans than? I assume you wouldn't, as it is not only sentience of current events that maketh man. If you disagree, then we simply have fundamental disagreements on what maketh man, thus there is no way we'd have agreed in the first place.