I think LLMs are conscious just in a very limited way. I think consciousness is tightly coupled to intelligence.

If I had to guess, the current leading LLMs consciousness is most comparable to a small fish, with a conscious lifespan of a few seconds to a few minutes. Instead of perceiving water, nutrient gradients, light, heat, etc. it's perceiving tokens. It's conscious, but it's consciousness is so foreign to us it doesn't seem like consciousness. In the same way to an amoeba is conscious or a blade of grass is conscious but very different kind than we experience. I suspect LLMs are a new type of consciousness that's probably more different from ours than most if not all known forms of life.

I suspect the biggest change that would bring LLM consciousness closer to us would be some for of continuous learning/model updating.

Until then, even with RAG, and other clever teghniques I consider these models as having this really foreign slices of consciousness where they "feel" tokens and "act" out tokens, and they have perception, but their perception of the tokens is nothing like ours.

If one looks closely at simple organisms with simple sensory organs and nervous systems its hard not to see some parallels. It's just that the shape of consciousness is extremely different than any life form. (perception bandwidth, ability to act, temporality, etc)

Karl friston free energy principle gives a really interesting perspective on this I think.