[AnimalMuppet]

I would say that LLM-based AI will never achieve consciousness.

It might even be that an unembodied AI will never achieve consciousness - that is, that direct sensory input and the ability to move around in the physical universe is critical for consciousness.

But never? No AI, no matter what approach it's built on? I'm an AI skeptic, and even I am not quite willing to go that far.

I kind of agree with rbanffy - we need a testable definition, and we don't have one. Still, we can look at AI and recognize that something is missing, even though we can't define what the "something" is.