The first large-scale assessment of ravens' cognitive abilities suggests that, by four months of age, ravens do about as well as adult chimps and orangutans on tests of causal reasoning, social learning, theory of mind, etc. https://nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77060-8
“Exploring in sparse-reward partially-observable tasks? BYOL-Explore harnesses the power of Self-Supervised Learning to solve such tasks only with prediction error as intrinsic reward, producing a conceptually simple yet powerful exploration agent” https://www.deepmind.com/publications/byol-explore-exploration-with-bootstrapped-prediction
Oxfam serves up a lot of dodgy statistics https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/oxfam-serves-up-a-lot-of-dodgy-statistics?s=r
A portable, self-contained neuroprosthetic hand with deep learning-based finger control https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/ac2a8d
Researchers Achieve ‘Absurdly Fast’ Algorithm for Network Flow https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-achieve-absurdly-fast-algorithm-for-network-flow-20220608/
The First High-Yield, Sub-Penny Plastic Processor: It took a major redesign for cheap flexible chips to reach their promise https://spectrum.ieee.org/plastic-microprocessor
Discovering the Potential of Probabilistic Computers (P-Computers) https://engineering.ucsb.edu/news/discovering-potential-p-computers
Calculating the "fingerprints" of molecules with artificial intelligence (graphical neural networks) https://www.helmholtz-berlin.de/pubbin/news_seite?nid=23806&sprache=en&seitenid=1
THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE ON EARTH https://www.politico.eu/article/suwalki-gap-russia-war-nato-lithuania-poland-border/
If only certain configurations of matter feature consciousness, do you believe that other configurations are possible that exhibit ineffable mental states transcending consciousness as much as human consciousness transcends the sentience of a stone?
Would aliens with such mental states even consider humans to have moral worth or would they view us the same way we view inanimate matter?
Morality very much boils down to sway given to the interests of the community of peers in opposition to what are or would otherwise be the individual's propensities. It's also comparable to linguistic conventions -- conventions that may be painted as arbitrary but that must be shared with peers. The postulate of the question appears to describe the aliens, as aliens to peerage with humans...