[estimator7292]

Will today's LLMs achieve consciousness? Almost certainly not.

Will AI as a general concept ever achieve human level cognition and sentience? Depends on your definition of "ever".

Anyone who tries to feed you a line about "never" doesn't understand what they're talking about. On almost any topic.

AI as a concept is never going away and if we keep working the problem, we will eventually achieve a sentient AI. There's nothing magical about meat, there's only things that we don't understand.

To assert that only a human meat brain can be conscious is to assert that only humans can be conscious. That excludes alien life for one, and a large fraction of terrestrial life. One can argue quite successfully that many terrestrial species are conscious and aware. Elephants, great apes, whales, dolphins, octopi, pigs, corvids.

If an octopus is conscious (and I have good reason to believe they are) why is it so ridiculous to think that a hunk of silicon can do it?

Humans really are not special. We're just animals like any other. Our brains are not cosmically blessed and unique. There is no magic.