Trying to outline the cruxes:
He was a commenter Overcoming Bias as @Shane_Legg, received a monetary prize from SIAI for his work, commented on SIAI's strategy on his blog, and took part in the 2010 Singularity Summit, where he and Hassabis would be introduced to Thiel as the first major VC funder of DeepMind (as recounted by both Altman in the tweet mentioned in OP, and in IABIED). I'm not sure this is "being influenced by early Lesswrong" as much as originating in the same memetic milieu – Shane Legg was the one who popularized the term "AGI" and wrote papers like this with Hutter, for example.
IIRC Aella and Grimes got copies in advance and AFAIK haven't written book reviews (at least not in the sense Scott or the press did).
Your scenario above was that most of the 8 billion people in the world would come to believe with high likelihood that ASI would cause human extinction. I think it's very reasonable to believe that this would make it quite easier to coordinate to make alternatives to MAGMA products more usable in this world, as network effects and economies of scale are largely the bottleneck here.
Is insider trading allowed on Manifold?
As a reality check, "any company which fund research into AGI" here would mean all the big tech companies (MAGMA). Much more people use those products than people know AGI developers. It is a much easier ask to switch to using a different browser/search engine/operating system, install an ad blocker, etc. than to ask for social ostracism. Those companies' revenues collapsing would end the AI race overnight, while having AGI developers keep a social circle of techno-optimists only wouldn't.
Ok, let's say we get most of the 8 billion people in the world to 'come to an accurate understanding of the risks associated with AI', such as the high likelihood that ASI would cause human extinction.
Then, what should those people actually do with that knowledge?
Boycotting any company which fund research into AGI would be (at least in this scenario) both more effective and, for the vast majority of people, more tractable than "ostracizing" people whose social environment is largely dominated by... other AI developers and like-minded SV techno-optimists.
I think one can make a stronger claim that the Curry-Howard isomorphism mean a superhuman (constructive?) mathematician would near-definitionally be a superhuman (functional?) programmer as well.