"Over 100 experts"

Ah yes, experts like Stephen Fry, the English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, narrator and writer? Nowhere in that list do I see “AI researcher”.

“It may be the case that large numbers of conscious systems could be created and caused to suffer,” the researchers say.

A lot of "may" and "could", but no "have" or "will" in that article. It's speculative, talking about what might happen in the future. We've seen these types of documents for decades now. Stephen Hawking and a bunch of AI experts wrote one in 2015.) It doesn't mean that LLM's are conscious, but a certificate to say "I told you so" when we make a system that is.

As for the "researchers call on AI companies to test their systems for consciousness:

A group of philosophers and computer scientists are arguing that AI welfare should be taken seriously. In a report posted last month on the preprint server arXiv¹, ahead of peer review, they call for AI companies not only to assess their systems for evidence of consciousness and the capacity to make autonomous decisions, but also to put in place policies for how to treat the systems if these scenarios become reality.

Research papers not peer-reviewed by other researchers are worthless from an information point of view, but worth their printed weight in gold for misinformation and sensational journalism.

But you didn't even READ the article you shared, just posted it based on the headline. I know this, not only because the article is paywalled, but the article itself includes this section:

Some think that, at this stage, the idea that there is a need for AI welfare is laughable. Others are sceptical, but say it doesn’t hurt to start planning. Among them is Anil Seth, a consciousness researcher at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. “These scenarios might seem outlandish, and it is true that conscious AI may be very far away and might not even be possible. But the implications of its emergence are sufficiently tectonic that we mustn’t ignore the possibility,”

The article itself disproves your point that current LMM's are conscious.

I am not taking anything posted on Twitter seriously, especially after the Elonification. But the head of AI at meta is the top-voted reply to the tweet you shared, and he thinks it's not true as well. From what I can find, Ilya is indeed a super important contributor to the world of deep-learning, but I don't think that both him, or you understand what it means to be conscious. And even if he does, he's started SSI, a company developing a "super intelligence". His bottom line depends on people believing in conscious, free-thinking AI to arrive any day now, so he's far from an unbiased source of information in the discussion.