It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.
Thinking positively, it could just be newsworthy because he is famous and he so misses the mark. Other older famous people might agree with us but that's not news.
To imply it could be conscious requires something else, here the comment uses the phrase magic to fill that gap - since we must agree that a CPU is not conscious on it's own (else everything our computer does would be conscious).
This isn’t a religious argument that there’s something about our brains which can’t be replicated, but simply that it’s sufficiently more complex than anything we have currently.
How do you measure "deeper understanding" in humans? You usually do it by asking them to show their work, show how the dots connect. Reasoning models are getting there, and when they do, I'm sure the goalposts will move yet again.
Humans are notorious for doing this.
This especially applies to mistakes: the junior developer who drops a database by mistake is unlikely to ever do that again, whereas the same AI companies models keep doing that to a small but non-zero number of customers because they don’t have that higher level learning process or anything like fear of consequences.
This is reinforced (pun not intended) by the continued issues with things like "should I walk or drive to the car wash"
Many things the human brain does don’t rise to the level of conscious awareness.
It remains to be seen whether a human brain can be conscious in a jar. If it can, then I’d still argue that some sub-unit of the whole brain is not conscious on its own, similarly a GPU running a GPT probably isn’t conscious, but there may be some scale of number of GPUs running software that might give rise to consciousness as an emergent ability.
GTP’s have exhibited emergent abilities as scale increased dramatically.
At least, that’s certainly not how I got here.