But the GP is talking about specific properties of large language models like GPT-3. A laptop is indeed a self-maintaining, self-monitoring system, at a low level. A large language model isn't that. It is just a map from input to output and doesn't keep track of it's previous output or input.

GPT-3 actually does track the previous 2048 tokens of input and output for context.

Your laptop does not know anything, any more than your thermostat knows when it's hot or a toaster knows when your toast is ready.

Furthermore, one can argue that consciousness is a requirement for knowledge.

You’re wading into epistemology, a topic that’s been discussed and debated for millennia. Which maybe relates to my larger point that the concept of “consciousness” quickly gets out of hand to the point where it seems to me a little silly to say neural nets are “slightly conscious.”