No AI system using the forward inference pass can ever be conscious.

I mean consciousness as in what it is like to be, from the inside. Current AI systems concentrate integration within the forward pass, and the forward pass is a bounded computation. Integration is not incidental. Across neuroscience, measures of large-scale integration are among the most reliable correlates of consciousness. Whatever its full nature, consciousness appears where information is continuously combined into a unified, evolving state. In transformer models, the forward pass is the only locus where such integration occurs.