he goes on later to say:

I get the distinct impression that the entire field was assuming that we were going to have to build a lot more into LLMs before they'd be capable of full consciousness

this is just arrogant. experiential consciousness requires the capability to self-reflect. yes, a 200k token context window is probably larger than the working memory of most humans, but that does not equate to human-level experiential consciousness.

LLMs do not and can not understand consequence, which is a fundamental requirement for experiential consciousness.

in other words, your pet dog or cat at home has more experiential consciousness than an LLM.