The public supports regulating AI for safety

This is good news, with caveats. Still, this is very much a good thing to keep in mind.

One major caveat is that the support for AI safety should be interpreted as a maximum, rather than a minimum or average, because of the fact that once policies that have actually being debated, support starts to waver. So there's been basic no adversarial stress test of support.

Sure, this is a useful poll, but I'm not so sure that the public understands AI.

Perhaps there is an opportunity to improve the public’s beliefs, attitudes, and memes and frames for making sense of AI.

Yes, I strongly agree, because I think someone should focus their efforts on providing simple, easy to understand explanations as to how AI works in collaboration with key players so the public comes to a decent understanding. Not to be elitist, but I don't think the public's opinion is a useful metric by which policy should be made regarding AI. I think it could potentially harm efforts moving forward in multiple areas.

Regulation in most other areas has been counterproductive.  In AI, it will likely be even more so:  there's at least some understanding of e.g. medicine by both the public and our rulers, but most people have no idea about the details of alignment.  

This could easily backfire in countless ways.  It could drive researchers out of the field, it could mandate "alignment" procedures that don't actually help and get in the way of finding procedures that do, it could create requirements for AIs to say what is socially desirable instead of what is true (chatGPT is already notorious for this), making it harder to tell how the AI is functioning...

It is socially desirable to call for regulation as a solution for almost any problem you care to name, but it is practically useful far more rarely.  This is AI alignment.  This is potentially the future of humanity at stake, and all human values.  If we cannot speak the truth here, when will we ever speak it? 

There are, of course, potentially reasonable counterarguments.  Someone might believe that AI capabilities are more fragile than AI alignment, for instance, such that regulation would tend to slow capabilities without greatly hampering alignment, and the time bought gave us a better chance of a good outcome.  Perhaps.  But please consider, are you calling for regulation because it actually makes sense, or because it's the Approved Answer to problems?  

Please don't make this worse.

How about regulating the purchase/rental of GPUs and especially TPUs?

For companies which already have GPU clusters, maybe we need data center regulation? Something like: The code only gets run on the data center if a statement regarding its safety has been digitally signed by at least N government-certified security researchers.