...specific ideas Eliezer has come up with over the years - the concept of seed AI...

I don't want to nitpick on this again but when exactly did he come up with that concept? Because it is mentioned in Karl Schroeder's Ventus (Tor Books, 2000.) ISBN 978-0312871970.

Here are a few quotes from Ventus:

Look at it this way. Once long ago two kinds of work converged. We'd figured out how to make machines that could make more machines. And we'd figured out how to get machines to... not exactly think, but do something very much like it. So one day some people built a machine which knew how to build a machine smarter than itself. That built another, and that another, and soon they were building stuff the men who made the first machine didn't even recognize.

[...]

And, some of the mechal things kept developing, with tremendous speed, and became more subtle than life. Smarter than humans. Conscious of more. And, sometimes, more ambitious. We had little choice but to label them gods after we saw what they could do--namely, anything.

[...]

They did not command the wealth of nations, these researchers. Although their grants amounted to millions of Euros, they could never have funded a deep-space mission on their own, nor could they have built the giant machineries they conceived of. In order to achieve their dream, they built their prototypes only in computer simulation, and paid to have a commercial power satellite boost the Wind seeds to a fraction of light speed. [...] no one expected the Winds to bloom and grow the way they ultimately did.

It is further explained that the Winds were designed to evolve on their own so they are not mere puppets of human intentions but possess their own intrinsic architecture.

In other places in the book it is explained how humans did not create their AI Gods but that they evolved themselves from seeds designed by humans.