Vice president Prabhakar Raghavan testified Friday that Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 for the purpose of maintaining default search engine status and acquiring traffic, Bloomberg reports. It's likely the lion's share of that sum went to Apple, which it has showered with exorbitant sums for many years in order to remain the default search option on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Raghavan, who was testifying as part of the DOJ's ongoing antitrust suit against the company, said Google's search advertising made $146.4 billion in revenue in 2021, which puts the $26 billion it paid for default status in perspective. The executive clarified that default status was the most costly part of what it pays to acquire traffic. Raghavan didn't mention how much of the $26.3 billion went to Apple. But CNBC reports that an estimate from private wealth management firm Bernstein ballparked that Google could pay Apple up to $19 billion this year for the default privilege.

Better understanding of Large Language Models' (LLMs) legal analysis abilities can contribute to improving the efficiency of legal services, governing artificial intelligence, and leveraging LLMs to identify inconsistencies in law. This paper explores LLM capabilities in applying tax law. We choose this area of law because it has a structure that allows us to set up automated validation pipelines across thousands of examples, requires logical reasoning and maths skills, and enables us to test LLM capabilities in a manner relevant to real-world economic lives of citizens and companies. Our experiments demonstrate emerging legal understanding capabilities, with improved performance in each subsequent OpenAI model release. We experiment with retrieving and utilising the relevant legal authority to assess the impact of providing additional legal context to LLMs. Few-shot prompting, presenting examples of question-answer pairs, is also found to significantly enhance the performance of the most advanced model, GPT-4. The findings indicate that LLMs, particularly when combined with prompting enhancements and the correct legal texts, can perform at high levels of accuracy but not yet at expert tax lawyer levels. As LLMs continue to advance, their ability to reason about law autonomously could have significant implications for the legal profession and AI governance.

The Justice Department says Google CEO Sundar Pichai (left) met privately with Apple chief Tim Cook in 2018 to discuss how their two companies could collaborate. The Justice Department says Google CEO Sundar Pichai (left) met privately with Apple chief Tim Cook in 2018 to discuss how their two companies could collaborate. Buried on page 36 of the Justice Department lawsuit accusing Google of abusing its monopoly power is this remarkable figure: $8 billion to $12 billion. That's the hefty sum Google allegedly paid Apple for one of the most prized pieces of real estate in the world of online search: default status on iPhones and all other Apple devices. Justice Department investigators say Apple, which does not have its own search engine, hammered out a multiyear deal making Google the default search engine on all iPhones and other Apple products.