Loads of people have intimated that ChatGPT shows we're on the precipice of a breakthrough in that direction. Chomsky says we're not. If Chomsky's argument is a strawman, Aaronson could write a blog post saying that, instead of a blog post stuffing his own strawman. Anyways, I'm summarizing Chomsky's argument as I understood it, you can read it yourself.
Blake Lemoine was the dude claiming Google’s LLM had a soul and got fired and all sorts of press attention.
It’s not a straw man. Blake was an outlier but also very much on the inside and not just some random wonk. There are plenty of people who are being led to believe that LLMs are much more than fancy statistics.
However, to be fair to Lemoine, we don't know whether Lamda is just an LLM like GPT or something else, it might have been a different architecture, which actually could learn from human conversations, and have experience, thus gain consciousness.