I'm not guessing. When I say it's a difference of kind, I really did mean that. There is no cognition here; and we know enough about cognition to say that LLMs are not performing anything like it.
Believing LLMs will eventually perform cognition with enough hardware is like saying, "if we throw enough hardware at a calculator, it will eventually become alive." Even if you throw all the hardware in the world at it, there is no emergent property of a calculator that would create sentience. So too LLMs, which really are just calculators that can speak English. But just like calculators they have no conception of what English is and they do not think in any way, and never will.