believing that a large language model has any kind of awareness or actual intelligence is absurd

I (as a person who works professionally in the area and tries to keep up with the current academic publications) happen to agree with you. But my credences are somewhat reduced after considering the points Hinton raises.

I think it is worth considering that there are a handful of academically active models of consciousness; some well-respected ones like the CTM are not at all inconsistent with Hinton’s statements