I think you're interpreting as ascendancy what is mostly just Silicon Valley realigning to the Republican Party (which is more of a return to the norm both historically and for US industrial lobbies in general). None of the Democrats you cite are exactly rising stars right now.

Wait, I heard that one before...

If you mean Meta and Mistral I agree. I trust EleutherAI and probably DeepSeek to not release such models though, and they're more centrally who I meant.

This isn't really the best example to use considering AI image generation is very much the one area where all the most popular models are open-weights and not controlled by big tech companies, so any attempt at regulating AI image generation would necessarily mean concentrating power and antagonizing the free and open source software community (something which I agree with OP is very ill-advised), and insofar as AI-skeptics are incapable of realizing that, they aren't reliable.

Yeah, this feel particularly weird because, coming from that kind of left-libertarian-ish perspective, I basically agree with most of it but also every time he tries to talk about object-level politics it feels like going into the bizarro universe and I would flip the polarity of the signs of all of it. Which is an impression I generally have with @richard_ngo's work in general, him being one of the few safetyists on the political right to not have capitulated to accelerationism-because-of-China (as most recently even Elon did). Still, I'll try to see if I have enough things to say to collect bounties.

I wasn't even contrasting "moral alignment" with "aligning to the creator's specific intent [i.e. his individual coherent extrapolated volition]", but with just "aligning with what the creator explicitly specified at all in the first place" ("inner alignment"?), which is implicitly a solved problem in the paperclip maximizer thought experiment if the paperclip company can specify "make as many paperclips as possible", and is very much not a solved problem in LLMs.

For the record, as someone who was involved in AI alignment spaces well before it became mainstream, my impression was that, before the LLM boom, "moral alignment" is what most people understood AI alignment to mean, and what we now call "technical alignment" would have been considered capabilities work. (Tellingly, the original "paperclip maximizer" thought experiment by Nick Bostrom assumes a world where what we now call "technical alignment" [edit: or "inner alignment"?] is essentially solved and a paperclip company can ~successfully give explicit natural language goals to its AI to maximize.)

In part this may be explained by updating on the prospect of LLMs becoming the route to AGI (with the lack of real utility function making technical alignment much harder than we thought, while natural language understanding, including of value-laden concepts, seems much more central to machine intelligence than we thought), but the incentives problem of AI alignment work being increasingly made under the influence of first OpenAI then OPP-backed Anthropic is surely a part of it.

(I suspect this explain like half of Émile Torres' deal.)

I'm not sure why you think we disagree, my "(by who?)" parenthetical was precisely pointing out that if poor countries aren't better-run it's not because it's not known what works for developing poor countries (state capacity, land reform, industrial policy), it's that the elites of those countries (dictators, generals, warlords, semi-feudal landlords and tribal chiefs; what Acemoglu and Robinson call "extractive institutions") are generally not incentive-aligned with the general well-being of the population and indeed are the ones who actively benefit from state capacity failures and rent-seeking in the first place.

I however don't see much reason to think that bringing back robust social democracy in developed countries is going to conclusively solve that (the golden age of social democracy certainly seemed to be compatible with desperately holding onto old colonial empires and then first propping up those very extractive institutions after formal decolonization under the guise of the Cold War), nor that the progress studies/abundance agenda people (mostly from bipartisan or conservative-leaning think tanks with ties to tech corporations and Peter Thiel in particular) seem to be particularly interested in bringing back robust social democracy in the first place.

Didn't really want to in depth go beyond what @Ozzie Gooen already said and mentioning the event that originally prompted that line of thought, but added a link to @David Thorstad's sequence on the subject.