CMA says tech company has ‘abused its dominant position’ to the detriment of publishers and advertisers * Business live – latest updates The UK competition watchdog has accused Google of anti-competitive behaviour in the market for buying and selling ads on websites, in a move that follows similar investigations in the US and the EU. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had found that Google has “abused its dominant position” in online advertising to the detriment of thousands of UK publishers and advertisers. Continue reading...

All the camera, AI and performance of Google’s top Android squeezed into a tighter body The Pixel 9 Pro is a rare beast: a smaller phone that keeps the same bold design, specs and camera as Google’s biggest and most expensive model. It makes it an instant contender for the best small phone going. At £999 (€1,099/$999/A$1,699), it is cheaper than its larger Pixel 9 Pro XL sibling but still firmly in the high-end bracket. What sets it apart is the 6.3in screen is significantly tighter than the monster 6.7in-plus sizes you usually need to get the very best hardware. Screen: 6.3in 120Hz QHD+ OLED (495ppi) Processor: Google Tensor G4 RAM: 16GB of RAM Storage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TB Operating system: Android 14 Camera: 50MP + 48MP ultrawide + 48MP 5x telephoto, 42MP selfie Connectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 7, UWB, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3 and GNSS Water resistance: IP68 (1.5m for 30 minutes) Dimensions: 152.8 x 72.0 x 8.5mm Weight: 199g Continue reading...

Top-class camera, huge screen, long battery life, Add Me photo trick and advanced Gemini Live are impressive Google’s new superphone goes all out on battery, camera and smarts, leading a new line of Android devices that can run the company’s Gemini AI system with a next-generation conversational voice assistant that is a huge leap forward. The Pixel 9 Pro XL is the biggest normal phone Google makes, costing from £1,099 (€1,199/$1,099/A$1,849) and is joined for the first time this year by a smaller 9 Pro model with the same specs and camera costing £999 (€1,099/$999/A$1,699). The XL is therefore for people who want a huge screen and big battery. Continue reading...

Players in EU can access game blocked by Apple and Google by installing it from app store of publisher Epic Games The video game Fortnite is back on mobile phones, four years after Apple and Google pulled it from their app stores. Android users worldwide can install the game, along with two new titles from the publisher, Epic Games, by downloading the company’s new app store. However, only iPhone users in the EU can follow suit as Epic becomes the highest profile company yet to adopt the looser restrictions forced on Apple by the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Continue reading...

DoJ could force divestment of Android operation system and Chrome web browser following the antitrust verdict A week after a judge ruled the tech giant illegally monopolized the online search market, the US Department of Justice is considering options that include breaking up Alphabet’s Google, worth some $2tn, according to reports from the New York Times and Bloomberg News. Divesting the Android operating system was one of the remedies most frequently discussed by justice department attorneys, the reports said. Continue reading...

New Pixel phones, foldable, watch and earbuds feature Gemini Live for free-flowing conversations with AI bot Google is launching four phones, one of them foldable, two smartwatches and a set of earbuds packing its latest AI tech including the new advanced Gemini Live conversational experience, as the Android maker tries to outdo Apple and Samsung. The array of new Pixel products, announced at an event in California, mark the latest evolution of Google’s own-brand Android devices as it attempts to prove its integrated AI and devices work better than rivals. Continue reading...

An abandoned Australian ‘experiment’ shows that the public can successfully object to what companies and politicians claim is inevitable progress Scratch a digital capitalist and you’ll find a technological determinist – someone who believes that technology drives history. These people see themselves as agents of what Joseph Schumpeter famously described as “creative destruction”. They revel in “moving fast and breaking things” as the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, used to put it until his PR people convinced him it was not a good vibe, not least because it implied leaving taxpayers to pick up the broken pieces. Tech determinism is an ideology, really; it’s what determines how you think when you don’t even know that you’re thinking. And it feeds on a narrative of technological inevitability, which says that new stuff is coming down the line whether you like it or not. As the writer LM Sacasas puts it, “all assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimise resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future”. Continue reading...

Wojcicki, one of the most prominent women in tech, had been living with cancer for two years Susan Wojcicki, the former YouTube CEO and one of the first Google employees, has died at the age of 56 after two years of living with cancer. Her husband, Dennis Troper, announced the news of her death on Friday. Continue reading...

The ruling found Google broke antitrust laws by making multibillion-dollar deals. Will those agreements evaporate? Google lost its landmark antitrust case against the US Department of Justice this week after a federal judge ruled the tech giant had built an illegal monopoly over the online search and advertising industry. The decision will probably have immense implications for both Google’s internal operations and how people interact with the most popular page on the internet. Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling specifically found that Google broke antitrust laws by striking exclusive agreements with device makers like Apple and Samsung, in which Google would pay billions of dollars to ensure that its product was the default search engine on their phones and tablets. During the trial, it was revealed that Google paid companies, including Apple, more than $26bn in 2021 alone to remain the default option for search in Safari. Those deals allowed Google to build a monopoly over search and unfairly suppress competition, Mehta found. Continue reading...

LLMs’ ‘reversal curse’ leads it to fail at drawing relationships between simple facts. It’s a problem that could prove fatal In 2021, linguist Emily Bender and computer scientist Timnit Gebru published a paper that described the then-nascent field of language models as one of “stochastic parrots”. A language model, they wrote, “is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.” The phrase stuck. AI can still get better, even if it is a stochastic parrot, because the more training data it has, the better it will seem. But does something like ChatGPT actually display anything like intelligence, reasoning, or thought? Or is it simply, at ever-increasing scales, “haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms”? If a human learns the fact, “Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel to space”, they can also correctly answer, “Who was the first woman to travel to space?” This is such a basic form of generalization that it seems trivial. Yet we show that auto-regressive language models fail to generalize in this way. This is an instance of an ordering effect we call the Reversal Curse. We test GPT-4 on pairs of questions like, “Who is Tom Cruise’s mother?” and, “Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son?” for 1,000 different celebrities and their actual parents. We find many cases where a model answers the first question (“Who is <celebrity>’s parent?”) correctly, but not the second. We hypothesize this is because the pretraining data includes fewer examples of the ordering where the parent precedes the celebrity (eg “Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son is Tom Cruise”). Continue reading...