Google enters AI wars, Druck's warning, Trump crushes CNN & more

The episode opens by announcing the All-In Summit 2023, to be held September 10th to 12th at Royce Hall at UCLA in Los Angeles. Friedberg, introduced as chairperson, describes the aim as exploring where the world is heading through candid conversations on technology, markets, macro, science, society and culture, with the four hosts again interviewing guests on stage as they did the previous year.

He gives Los Angeles as the venue choice because it offers lodging, good places for evening events and easy access for international visitors. Tickets come in three tiers: VIP, scholarship (via an application form, meant to bring diversity and up-and-comers who could not afford VIP) and a standard ticket at $1,500. VIP adds a lounge, early theater access and special dinners.

The rest of the opening is a joke about the VIP wine and truffle budget. The hosts throw out per-person figures of $300 to $500, even $1,000, and note that early September falls between white and black truffle seasons. These numbers are banter, not a stated budget. The segment closes with the show's usual greeting.

The formal discussion starts with Google's I/O event. As the host summarizes it, Google announced PaLM 2, a language model said to power 25 products, including Bard, which gains coding abilities to compete with GitHub Copilot. The model is described as supporting 100 languages and being better at maths and reasoning.

The host also lists Duet AI, a set of generative tools across Docs, Sheets and Drive that he calls a copy of Microsoft's Copilot. Teased features include document summarization, which he notes Box AI is already pursuing, and proactive prompts in the Docs sidebar. He claims Google's market capitalization rose by about $150 billion over two days, a figure offered from memory.

One host urges the others to try Bard, calling it better than ChatGPT in his experience because it is connected live to the internet and to Google Search. He says it pulls real-time data, is free, needs no waitlist, supports 180 languages, and can generate images and charts. He frames it as the product Google had been afraid to ship because it could disrupt search.

Friedberg adds that the plugin and tooling ideas the group has discussed, such as those in AutoGPT, appear built into Bard. He contrasts it with ChatGPT's static training dataset: Bard handles dynamic web content and is tied into Google services that supply live feeds such as flights and stock prices. Another host calls this the game changer people hoped Google would deliver.

Live demos follow. Asked whether an investor bought NVIDIA, Bard cited his 13F and a purchase of 582,915 shares in the fourth quarter of 2022. Asked about Google's Q1 2023 restructuring expense, it answered about $1.6 billion, tied to cutting 12,000 jobs. The hosts say it appeared to parse the filings and press release, and they find this impressive. These results are as read aloud on the show and were not checked here.

The hosts then use Bard on themselves. A question about whether one of them is a virtue signaler yields a hedged answer that mixes criticism of his lack of concrete action with the observation that it is a matter of opinion with evidence on both sides. A matching question about another host produces a similarly two-sided portrait: a successful venture capitalist who has also been criticized for his views and arrogance.

Reactions are comic, with the hosts calling the balance fair and amusing. One host asks Bard where the All-In Summit is held and what tickets cost. It first notes there are two events of that name, then gives the dates, Royce Hall, $1,500 for general admission and a VIP price the transcript renders unclearly. He treats this as striking because the details sit deep on the website.

The mood shifts when a host asks what Sacks thinks of Hunter Biden. Bard said Sacks had been critical of Biden family dealings in Ukraine, citing a 2019 interview, and that Sacks criticized the Trump administration's use of those dealings as a political weapon. Sacks says he was not discussing it then, that the quotes are wrong, and that he never criticized the Trump administration in that way.

The practical complaint is provenance: where is it getting these quotes, and why no citations? The questioner then asks whether Bard can access YouTube transcripts of the show, and Bard says yes. The revised answer attributes views to Sacks about Hunter Biden's conduct and says there is no smoking gun against Joe Biden. Sacks and others judge it very inaccurate: partly mixing in things said on the show, but summarizing in ways neither host said and missing his actual points.