there are individuals of the Less Wrong community who strongly support SIAI's work and goals concerning AI, but who simultaneously would not consider such AI creations to be of greater moral value than humans

I normally hate to do this, but Nonsentient Optimizers says it better than I could. If you're building an AI as a tool, don't make it a person.

The failure to see a qualitative difference between humans, baboons and computers suggests an inability to distinguish between living and non-living entities, and I think that is irrational.

That's a question of values, though. I don't value magnitude of consciousness; if baboons were uplifted to be more intelligent than humans on average, I would still value humans more.