The Chinese room thought experiment proved nothing, except that people are willing to latch on to bad philosophy. This author hasn't nailed down consciousness, and so is teetering on the edge of a dualist, vitalist cliff.

Consciousness is just a log file. It's our mind's representation of itself. Suppose we decide to eat something because we're hungry. What actually happens is a vast array of calculations in our meat computer considering many inputs and possibilities. However, once the "eat" action is selected, it summarizes all the calculations into "I was hungry so I decided to eat" and feeds it back into the meat computer as input for the next round of calculation.

Therefore, the only "proof" we have of no consciousness in the current LLM zoo is that they're all once-through.