The way I explain it in simplified terms; libraries helped us find books, search engines helped us find documents, LLMs help us find words. I expect LLMs to also provide a similar order of magnitude improvement in knowledge retrieval that we saw from those, which is a huge deal, but they are not on the path to AI consciousness.

That said, they may be an important processing component for assisting a consciousness, just like how in our brains we have different cortexes that primarily assist in processing information subconsciously.