> A LLM is stateless

Unless you mean by that something entirely different than what most people specifically on Hacker News, of all places, understand with "stateless", most and myself included, would disagree with you regarding the "stateless" property. If you do mean something entirely different than implying an LLM doesn't transition from a state to a state, potentially confined to a limited set of states through finite immutable training data set and accessible context and lack of PRNG, then would you care to elaborate?

Also, it can be stateful _and_ without a consciousness. Like a finite automaton? I don't think anyone's claiming (yet) any of the models today have consciousness, but that's mostly because it's going to be practically impossible to prove without some accepted theory of consciousness, I guess.

An agent is notably not stateless.

While I'm definitely not in the "let's assign the concept of sentience to robots" camp, your argument is a bit disingenuous. Most modern LLM systems apply some sort of loop over previously generated text, so they do, in fact, have state.