>Completely uncontroversial, yet we don't have a metric and we haven't defined it precisely.

but we have witnessed countless infants grow up and qualify as what we consider to be 'conscious'.

we haven't yet seen that jump in AI, thus we have no way of knowing the distance to there from where we're at.

I and many others strongly disagree with the statement’s assumption that infants are not conscious, so it’s not a completely uncontroversial statement. Sure, they have very limited I/O, but I understand that as orthagonal to consciousness.

Replace "infant" with fetus then...

Still not uncontroversial: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31922622/

It's obviously not controversial. Your linked article doesn't claim that a 0-week old Fetus is conscious. It claims you can define consciousness in such a way that a 24 week old fetus is conscious. That 100% completely reinforces my point, which is that we are in agreement that a 0-week fetus moves toward consciousness (your article claims it achieves it by 24 weeks). We are able to agree on that without agreeing on the definition of consciousness, so the lack of a unanimous definition doesn't prevent us from pointing at AI and saying "this is moving toward consciousness".