Conscium was founded in 2024 by the British AI researcher and entrepreneur Daniel Hulme, and its advisers include an impressive assortment of neuroscientists, philosophers, and experts in animal consciousness. When we first talked, Hulme was realistic: There are good reasons to doubt that language models are capable of consciousness. Crows, octopuses, even amoeba can interact with their environments in ways chatbots cannot. Experiments also suggest that AI utterances do not reflect coherent or consistent states. As Hulme put it, echoing the wide consensus: “Large language models are very crude representations of the brain.”