For example, if you're in fundamental science (or generally a fan of reductionism), it for sure would be nice to understand the universe instead of just having access to an AI that can comprehend it. But to the majority of the population it only matters that someone (or something) understands it enough to make it useful to others.

[1] https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench-2

This is a very typical manager question that I suppose many people have who fail to see the simple truth: There is no "best" model. There are only best models for certain use-cases. Sometimes you'll find these in custom community leaderboards on platforms like huggingface, but for most business applications you'll probably have to come up with your own benchmark. Most common benchmarks are pretty worthless by now because all the usual ones are being gamed hard by model providers, to the point that there are now sometimes drastic differences between models that perform very similarly on common benchmarks.

This is not a question of definition. Conservatism is what I wrote, period. See e.g.: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/

The issue here is that most Americans no longer have any clue what it actually means, because they only associate party politics with it that are by now completely disconnected. But the definition itself has never changed.

>People who are otherwise pro immigration, pro social change, pro downwards wealth redistribution, etc. are typically against AI.

Are they? This is a pretty rigorous statement mixing in a lot of smaller ones and thus would need some actual data to back it up. I know many people I would classify as traditional "liberals" by the virtues you describe, but who are very much pro new tech and by extension, pro-AI. They are only against if they fall for the usual social media doomsayers, but from my experience they are more likely to do so the less they know or care about new technology (which in some sense directly translates to higher conservatism too I suppose).