Daily Archives: April 18, 2024

Big tech firms have been solid business for office landlords across the country, but the end of a growth spurt in the sector means thats no longer the case.

Many of the top technology companies are downsizing or reevaluating their office needs across the country, the Wall Street Journal reported. Those firms reluctance to keep vast amounts of space is another hit to commercial owners.

Amazon, one of the largest office tenants in the entire country, is looking to reduce its office vacancies by passing on lease renewals, terminating some deals early and dropping underutilized floors.

Alphabets Google and Meta are also reconsidering their office needs. The former has listed office space in tech mecca Silicon Valley for sublease, while Mark Zuckerbergs company is leasing less space than it did at the onset of the pandemic, an acknowledgement that remote work is here to stay, as well as a cost-cutting measure being deployed by tech firms everywhere.

Meanwhile, in 30 cities with a high volume of technology tenants, office space up for sublease is at its highest levels in a decade, according to CBRE. The volume of new office space leased by tech companies in the fourth quarter was roughly half of the space leased in the same quarter in 2019.

The loss of tech tenants isnt only damaging to office landlords. It can also spell a dip in business for retail landlords in central business districts who rely on steady foot traffic to draw in business.

The vacancy rate of offices across the country rose to 19.8 percent in the first quarter, according to preliminary data from Moodys Analytics, representing a record for its tracker.

Holden Walter-Warner

Read this article:

Tech Firms Retreating From Office Market - The Real Deal

Reset Australia says Meta does not label all untrue content. Photo: Shutterstock

Digital advocacy group Reset Australia has sounded a clear alarm over voluntary big tech regulation and called on the federal government to step in after its complaint about Facebooks handling of misinformation was thrown out.

Reset Australia this week went public with its five-month long battle with Facebook parent company Meta and big tech representative mob Digital Industry Group Inc (DIGI) over the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation.

Reset Australia has accused DIGI of a conflict of interest between its role in overseeing this code and in receiving funding from many of the companies subject to it.

It has urged the federal government to ditch its practice of using voluntary codes to oversee the tech sector and instead turn to big stick regulation.

In response, DIGI emphasised that the subcommittee handling complaints under the code is independent, that the industry group does not have a vote on it, and that voluntary industry codes designed by industry groups are common practice across a number of sectors.

The issue came to a head as a result of a statement made by Meta in its annual transparency report under the code, with the company saying that it has been applying a warning label to content found to be false by third-party fact-checking organisations.

Reset argued that this statement is untrue as Meta does not actually label all content that contains fact-checked falsehoods.

Metas policy involves the use of AI to find identical or near-identical versions of a post that has been found to be untrue by the independent fact-checkers.

Reset said that despite Meta claiming it is labelling all pieces of misinformation, many posts are slipping through the gap if they are merely worded slightly differently or even posted in a different colour.

Reset Australia produced 152 posts found to be repeating fact-checked falsehoods and reported these to Meta, but just 8 per cent of these posts were labelled.

In response to the letter, Meta agreed to provide further clarification on this process in this years annual report, but refused to make a public correction.

This led Reset to trigger the complaints process under the misinformation code, with an independent subcommittee meeting in March to discuss it.

This week the committee opted to reject Reset Australias complaint, finding that Meta had made a fair and reasonable offer to update its next report with additional information, but that this was rejected.

Reset said this is a mischaracterisation of what occurred.

We requested Meta provide further information so stakeholders could meaningfully verify the claims they made in their last transparency report, Reset Australia said in a statement.

We thanked Meta for their suggestion to add clarifying language in their next transparency report, but urged them to make a public correction. Meta refused to do that, and DIGI has endorsed their position.

Voluntary regulations

The decision reflects the weakness of the voluntary misinformation code, Reset Australia executive director Alice Dawkins said.

The decision today indicates that platforms can say what they like in their transparency reports and their source of independent audit does not have the capacity to run significant data testing of platforms claims, Dawkins said.

Reset Australia is now pushing for the federal government to step in and implement binding regulations and laws to oversee these big tech firms.

The Minister for Communications has said doing nothing is not an option, on misinformation. Well, were sounding a clear alarm that its time for government to do something, Dawkins said.

Big tech have carte blanche in Australia to make whatever decisions they like on our information environment, shroud those systems and processes in PR waffle and block critical scrutiny.

DIGI responds

DIGI managing director Sunita Bose in response said that it is common practice across a number of industries for these codes to be developed by industry associations.

As DIGI is an industry association for the technology sector, we have put strict firewalls in place to avoid conflicts of interest in our administration of the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, Bose said.

Bose said that the members of the complaints subcommittee are compensated by DIGI but are contractually independent, and that DIGI is the secretary of the subcommittee but cannot vote on its decisions.

In its decision, the independent subcommittee said that Reset Australia had produced no convincing evidence that Metas transparency report contained false statements, and that Meta has made information on its labelling and fact-checking processes available publicly.

Original post:

Time for government to regulate big tech - ACS

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning , Next-Generation Technologies & Secure Development

The British antitrust authority warned Thursday that the market for foundational models in generative artificial intelligence is taking on "winner takes all" dynamics that could entrench a small number of providers.

See Also: 9 Best Practices for Artifact Management

U.K. Competition and Markets Authority head Sarah Cardell in a speech said the regulator won't repeat the hands-off approach that characterized its approach to digital markets over the past decade.

"Could we have responded faster to the competitive threats posed by large digital platforms, recognizing earlier that the tools we had would need adapting to address the unique challenges posed by this new breed of businesses? With the benefit of hindsight, I think the answer is almost certainly 'yes,'" she told a Washington, D.C. audience.

The same patterns of "incumbent firms leveraging their core market power to obstruct new entrants" is again present in the nascent generative AI market, Cardell said.

She pointed to a paper published that day by the CMA concluding that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple - collectively dubbed the GAMMA firms - are presences up and down the foundational model value chain, raising the specter of greater levels of vertical integration.

Four firms with an outsize presence in offering compute or data resources - Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft - could restrict access to critical inputs. Incumbents for consumer or business facing markets could distort choices and restrict competition in foundational model deployment, the report states.

In addition to vertical integration, the regulator sounded a warning over a proliferation of partnerships and strategic investments, identifying an "interconnected web" of more than 90 firms involving GAMMA firms plus chip designer Nvidia

While partnerships could assist independent developers and increase competition, "we are also vigilant against the possibility that incumbent firms may try to use partnerships and investments to quash competitive threats, even where it is uncertain whether those threats will materialize," the report reads.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company welcomes the "clarity and transparency provided by the report," and that the company is looking forward to engaging constructively with the UK CMA.

The report comes after some British lawmakers warned the competition regulator of potential risk arising from a small number of the largest tech companies influencing the policy developments in the country to use their products to power smaller models for market monopoly (see: UK Market Regulator Reviews Microsoft's Interest in OpenAI ).

Microsoft's close relationship with OpenAI faces similar scrutiny in the European Union. The European competition regulator is additionally investigating $16.3 million, multiyear partnership with Paris-based Mistral AI (see: EU to Analyze Partnership Between Microsoft and Mistral AI).

View post:

UK Markets Authority Warns of AI Market Capture by Big Tech - BankInfoSecurity.com