Well I don't understand the nitroglycerin reference and of course "computationally universal" doesn't mean "sentient" but the point is when you add the external memory they (Flan-U-PaLM 540B to be specific) have been demonstrated to be capable of simulating a specific, well defined Turing machine without special training. There are some other papers out there arguing this from a theoretical angle too, but this is the one whose title I quoted:
5 thermostats in the right comfiguration can be a universal computer. Approximation, in the computational sense, is relative to some well defined function, which gives the approximation an ontology. The feasability of approximation is not disputed, but the content and nature of the ontology is a battlefield of motivated rhetoric.
Yes, this is arguing semantics but in this particular case, semantics is the whole point.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04589