I'd agree, I don't think we are anywhere near a ghost in the shell level of consciousness, however a rudimentary, unrecognisable form may well have been created in some LLM's. But I think what's more important than intelligence at this point is productivity. I mean, what is intelligence if not the correct application of knowledge? And what we have at the moment is going to create massive increases in productivity, which is obviously required on the way to the singularity. Now it could be that this is the limit of our technological capabilities, but that seems unlikely given the progress we have made so far and the points I outlined above. Is some level of consciousness required for systems that seem to show a small level of intelligence? David Chalmers seems to think so. We still don't have an agreed definition of how to measure intelligence, but let's assume it's an IQ test, well I've heard that ChatGPT has an IQ of 83 https://twitter.com/SergeyI49013776/status/1598430479878856737?t=DPwvrr36u9y8rGlTBtwGIA&s=19 which is low level human. is intelligence, as measured by iq test, all that's needed? Can we achieve super intelligence without a conscious agent? Can we achieve it with an agent that has no goals and objectives? These are questions we aren't fully equipped to answer yet, but should become clearer as we keep on building in what has been created.