Depends on your definition I guess. Some academics make careers out of pseudo-philosophical twitter posts.

It is. I'd argue that alignment is the difference between GPT-3, which was a neat toy for nerds, and ChatGPT.

Yes. It’s very important. Think of it as quantifying whether a model understood the objective. This is, as you’d expect, especially important for auto-regressive models.

its meaning has shifted to now mean ESG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_cor...) and DEI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity,_equity,_and_inclusi...) for corporations that make algorithms that have learned natural language well enough that people are talking with them and taking them seriously. the AI alignment guys don't like that and they have started calling their old AI alignment meaning as 'not-kill-everyoneism' with mixed results (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMzBhCRrr7otmqcvK/notkilleve...).

EDIT: btw i don't have anything against ESG or DEI. I'm not a culture warrior complaining about 'woke ai'. I'm also not a lesswrong guy. I'm answering the OP's question "Is machine learning model "alignment" a serious academic concept? I've only seen this mentioned in pseudo-philosophical Twitter posts before." by saying what they mean now by 'AI alignment'.

Yeah, but like every other term in AI, no two people agree on what the word means so discussion around it is challenging.

Academic concepts are only considered serious by convention

yes