Even if you model it like a smart person that doesn't think faster on average, there is the issue that a few minutes later you are dealing with a small army of smart people that are perfectly aligned with each other, and are capable of tricks like varying their clock rates based on cost, sharing data/info/knowledge directly, separation of training and inference onto different hardware, on-demand multitasking without task-switching costs, ability to generally trade-off computational space for time for energy, etc.

A silicon intelligence that is approximately human equivalent gets a lot of potentially game-changing capabilities simply by virtue of it's substrate and the attendant infrastructure.

Exactly, the right model is probably something like it will be in relation to humans as humans are to frogs. Frogs can't even begin to comprehend even the most basic of human motivations or plans.

However, all of this is moot if the team developing the AI does not even try to align it.

The more someone believes in the dangers of ai-alignment, the less faith they should have that it can be solved.