The European Commission claims that Google boosted its own apps and products to the top of search rankings to the detriment of its competitors. The European Commission has levied a $1 billion penalty against Google over alleged competition law violations. An EC investigation found that Google had abused its dominance in the European Union's search and app store markets to funnel people toward its own apps and services, in violation of the EU's Digital Markets Act . The body has ordered Google to refrain from giving preferential treatment to its own services--such as shopping, accommodations, transport, and flights--in search rankings. Google must also allow app developers to communicate and transact with users outside the Play Store, where it takes a commission on sales .

The European Union has fined Google 890 million euros ($1bn), saying the technology giant broke digital antitrust rules by steering users of Google Play and its search engine towards its own services and apps at the expense of rivals. Thursday's penalty is the latest in Brussels' crackdown on Big Tech, which has seen the bloc lead the world in reining in the largest firms from Silicon Valley to Beijing. The European Commission, the bloc's executive branch, said it was acting in the interest of consumers. "The best products should succeed because they're better, not because they're owned by the company running the search engine. And European consumers have a right to be told by app developers where to sign up to the best offers, even when the app store owner does not get a cut," said Teresa Ribera, the commission's executive vice president for clean, just and competitive transition.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. A new federal lawsuit by California drivers accuses major gas chains, including Walmart and 7-Eleven, and technology company Kalibrate of using AI software to collude and keep pump prices artificially high.

Firms' algorithm development practices are often homogeneous. Whether firms train algorithms on similar data or rely on similar pre-trained models, the result is correlated predictions. In the context of personalized pricing, correlated algorithms can be viewed as a means to collude among competing firms, but whether or not this conduct is legal depends on the mechanisms of achieving collusion. We investigate the precise mechanisms through a formal game-theoretic model. Indeed, we find that (1) higher correlation diminishes consumer welfare and (2) as consumers become more price sensitive, firms are increasingly incentivized to compromise on the accuracy of their predictions in exchange for coordination. We demonstrate our theoretical results in a stylized empirical study where two firms compete using personalized pricing algorithms. Our results demonstrate a new mechanism for achieving collusion through correlation, which allows us to analyze its legal implications. Correlation through algorithms is a new frontier of anti-competitive behavior that is largely unconsidered by US antitrust law.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) show great promise, their tendencies to hallucinate pose significant risks in high-stakes domains like finance, especially when used for regulatory reporting and decision-making. Existing hallucination detection benchmarks fail to capture the complexities of financial benchmarks, which require high numerical precision, nuanced understanding of the language of finance, and ability to handle long-context documents. To address this, we introduce PHANTOM, a novel benchmark dataset for evaluating hallucination detection in long-context financial QA. Our approach first generates a seed dataset of high-quality "query-answer-document (chunk)" triplets, with either hallucinated or correct answers - that are validated by human annotators and subsequently expanded to capture various context lengths and information placements. We demonstrate how PHANTOM allows fair comparison of hallucination detection models and provides insights into LLM performance, offering a valuable resource for improving hallucination detection in financial applications. Further, our benchmarking results highlight the severe challenges out-of-the-box models face in detecting real-world hallucinations on long context data, and establish some promising directions towards alleviating these challenges, by fine-tuning open-source LLMs using PHANTOM.1

'Creepy' Listening Tool for Targeted Ads Didn't Actually Work, FTC Says Three firms will pay nearly $1 million for selling "Active Listening" technology that they claimed tapped people's phones for advertising. The FTC alleges the "tech" was just pricey email lists. The Federal Trade Commission announced on Thursday that Cox Media Group and two other marketing companies, MindSift LLC and 1010 Digital Works, have agreed to collectively pay nearly $1 million to settle allegations that they deceived their customers--other businesses--by claiming that they could help target ads based on audio recordings collected from consumers' smart devices via a marketing service called Active Listening. In a statement to WIRED, a spokesperson for CMG says, "We are pleased to have this matter resolved. Our local marketing team relied on marketing materials provided to us by a third-party vendor about their product. We withdrew the materials expeditiously and stopped further use of the product."

A top Google scientist warned EU antitrust regulators that its proposal requiring the company to share search engine data with rivals risked exposing users' private information. BRUSSELS - A top Google scientist sent a warning to EU antitrust regulators on Tuesday that its proposal requiring the company to share search engine data with rivals such as OpenAI risked exposing users' private information, the sternest rebuke yet in a tussle over Google's lucrative business model. The European Commission, which acts as the EU competition enforcer, has in recent years cracked down on Big Tech via a slew of legislation to ensure that users have more choices and that smaller rivals have room to compete. However, that has triggered the ire of the U.S. government. Sergei Vassilvitskii, with the title of distinguished scientist at Google since 2012 and regarded a leader in his field, will meet EU antitrust officials on Wednesday to voice his concerns and propose a broader approach with better guardrails.

Their novel solutions outperformed GPT -4, showcasing FinBen's potential to drive innovations in financial LLMs.