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Marketplace Tech

Monday through Friday, Marketplace demystifies the digital economy in less than 10 minutes. We look past the hype and ask tough questions about an industry that's constantly changing.

Wed, April 30, 2025
Meta's news blackout in Canada causes problems during election
Canada's liberal party and its leader Mark Carney are set to remain in control after the country held federal elections Monday. They were the first since Canada adopted the Online News Act in 2023, which requires online content providers — like social media platforms — to negotiate some sort of "fair" payment to news publishers in exchange for using their content. They can also do what Meta did — block news from their Facebook and Instagram platforms altogether. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Marketplace Senior Washington Correspondent Kimberly Adams, who’s been reporting on the election from Canada, to learn more about that law and what happened to the online news environment after it passed.
Tue, April 29, 2025
A battery farm in the Bronx could help clean up New York's power grid
One of the most powerful tools in the fight against climate change is the money sitting in investment portfolios - especially the trillions of dollars invested on behalf of public retirees. That’s money that could continue to fund fossil fuel development, or help pay for climate solutions instead. New York City has implemented an ambitious Net Zero plan for its public pensions. That plan includes divesting from some fossil fuel companies and investing billions of dollars in climate solutions. One company benefiting from that investment is NineDot Energy. Wedged between an elementary school and a big box shopping center in the Northeast Bronx, NineDot Energy is operating a battery farm that the city’s utility company, Con Ed, can call on to help relieve the grid when it gets overstressed. “The batteries hold a combined three megawatts of battery storage. That’s enough to power about 3,000 New York City households for four hours on a hot summer day. Last summer, the battery farm was called half a dozen times, which was enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a combined 24 metric tons. That’s the equivalent of nine thousand car trips on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Currently, the city has the dirtiest energy grid in the state. More than 90% of its power comes from fossil fuels. NineDot Energy is still in growth mode, but battery farms like this could eventually help the grid transition to renewable sources, like wind and solar. “The sun only shines when nature tells it to; the wind only blows when nature tells it to, but people use electricity when they decide to,” explained Adam Cohen, co-founder of NineDot Energy. “A battery helps mediate that process. It pulls in the extra power when it's available, and then puts it back out when people call for it.” On a recent visit to the Bronx facility, 12-year-old Virtue Onoja showed off a mural she helped paint along with other students from the elementary school across the street, envisioning a future powered by cleaner energy. “One thing about me, I'm definitely an artist,” she said. “I drew a clear blue sky, no pollution, no nothing [and] beautiful yellow flowers and the sun.” There are also drawings of windmills and electric school buses. “There's still a lot of pollution, not just in the Bronx, but just in New York in general,” Onoja said. “All of this is the goal that we want to achieve.” This is an excerpt from the latest season of How We Survive. Listen to the full episode here .
Mon, April 28, 2025
AI can't read the room
Leyla Isik, a professor of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University, is also a senior scientist on a new study looking at how good AI is at reading social cues. She and her research team took short videos of people doing things — two people chatting, two babies on a playmat, two people doing a synchronized skate routine — and showed them to human participants. After, they were asked them questions like, are these two communicating with each other? Are they communicating? Is it a positive or negative interaction? Then, they showed the same videos to over 350 open source AI models. (Which is a lot, though it didn't include all the latest and greatest ones out there.) Isik found that the AI models were a lot worse than humans at understanding what was going on. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes visited Isik at her lab in Johns Hopkins to discuss the findings.
Fri, April 25, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review - OpenAI's for-profit troubles, FTC sues Uber and how VCs are weathering Trump tariffs
It's the last Friday in April and it's time for Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review. This week, we'll talk about how the Federal Trade Commission is suing Uber over its subscription service. Plus, how the VC world is navigating the uncertainty created by the trade war. But first, a nonprofit pivot is facing some challenges. Open AI, the maker of ChatGPT was founded about a decade ago as a nonprofit research lab. It's now looking to restructure as a for-profit — specifically, a public benefit corporation But that transformation is facing resistance. About 10 former Open AI employees, along with several Nobel laureates and other experts, have written an open letter asking regulators in California and Delaware to block the change. They argue that nonprofit control is crucial to Open AI's mission, which is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, about how unusual it is to see this kind of conversion. YouTube Video of Marketplace Tech Bytes More on everything we talked about An Open Letter - Not For Private Gain Ex-OpenAI workers ask California and Delaware AGs to block for-profit conversion of ChatGPT maker - from the Associated Press OpenAI’s Latest Funding Round Comes With a $20 Billion Catch - from the Wall Street Journal FTC Takes Action Against Uber for Deceptive Billing and Cancellation Practices - from the Federal Trade Commission FTC sues Uber over difficulty of canceling subscriptions, “false” claims - from ArsTechnica White House Considers Slashing China Tariffs to De-Escalate Trade War - from the Wall Street Journal VC manufacturing deals were already declining
Thu, April 24, 2025
Is community fact-checking the future of social media moderation?
TikTok is going to be testing a new crowd-sourced fact-checking system called Footnotes. It’s seems similar to the Community Notes systems already in use on other social media, such as X and Facebook. TikTok is also keeping its current fact-checking systems in place. The way these community systems generally work is, say someone makes a post stating "whales are the biggest fish out there." Another user could add a note saying "actually, whales are mammals, and here's a source with more information." Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Vanderbilt psychology professor Lisa Fazio about why this model of "citizen fact-checking" is catching on.
Wed, April 23, 2025
Cities take the lead in battling rent-setting algorithms
The use of algorithmic software in setting residential rents has come under scrutiny in recent years. In 2024, the Joe Biden administration sued real estate company RealPage, alleging that its algorithm, which aggregates and analyzes private data on the housing market, enables landlords to collude in pricing and stifles competition. There's no word yet on what the second Donald Trump administration's Justice Department will do with this case. But in the meantime, some cities are banning the use of these algorithms completely. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Robbie Sequeira, who has been reporting on the issue for Stateline.
Tue, April 22, 2025
This company uses AI to make workers AI-savvy — and keep their jobs
We've sometimes wished we could have our own Wendy Rhodes, the performance coach at the hedge fund on the TV show “Billions.” Most workplaces, however, aren't bringing in billions and can't afford a Wendy. But an upskilling platform called Multiverse uses artificial intelligence to provide personalized, on-the-job guidance. Its AI coach, Atlas, helps workers expand their abilities and keep themselves relevant in an economy that makes skills obsolete faster than ever before, says Ujjwal Singh, chief product and technology officer at Multiverse.
Mon, April 21, 2025
Mobile apps are failing users with disabilities
Developers of mobile apps have "room for improvement" in making their platforms fully accessible for disabled users, according to a new report from the software company ArcTouch and the digital research platform Fable. It looked at fifty popular apps and assessed them for features that improve accessibility like screen reading, text size adjustability, voice controls and multiple screen orientations. The apps were tested by disabled users who reported a poor or failing experience almost three-quarters of the time. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ben Ogilvie, head of accessibility at ArcTouch, to learn more about why so many apps are behind.
Fri, April 18, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — Meta's antitrust trial, Nvidia's export restraint, and Jack Dorsey's hot take on IP law
NVIDIA gets caught up in the trade war, the titans of Twitter/X debate intellectual property law — and the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case against Meta kicks off in court. We're digging into all of it on today's Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, about what we learned in week one of Meta's monopoly trial.
Thu, April 17, 2025
For the 2034 Olympics, Utah wants air taxis instead of Ubers
Flying cars have been a staple of science-fiction visions of the future for ages. Perhaps most famously in “Back to the Future II.” The film may have overshot the mark a bit with Doc and Marty McFly navigating full-on air highways in 2015. But Utah is pushing for the technology to take off by 2034, when the state hosts the Olympic and paralympic winter games. We're not exactly talking about flying Delorians or vehicles you'd recognize as a car, but rather small, lightweight aircraft for traveling shorter distances. Reporter Caroline Ballard got a first look at the air taxis.
Wed, April 16, 2025
Can the U.S. get around China's restrictions on rare earth minerals?
China is responsible for most of the world’s processing of rare earth metals and minerals, but its new export restrictions have raised the stakes for U.S. efforts to build its own supply chain and processing industry. Barbara Arnold, a professor of mining engineering at Penn State, says there are options, but they require time, development and investment.
Tue, April 15, 2025
Virginia's reliance on surveillance tech raises data privacy questions
Surveillance technology like automated license plate readers has become commonplace in policing. They've made it easier to locate stolen vehicles and track suspects, but they've also raised concerns about civil liberties. Cardinal News Executive Editor Jeff Schwaner took a 300-mile drive through the state to see how often his car would be recorded. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Schwaner about his experience and issues related to privacy and who has access to the data.
Mon, April 14, 2025
Is using AI in job interviews cheating?
One area where artificial intelligence has been swiftly adopted is software coding. Google even boasted last year that more than a quarter of its code was generated by AI. But the technology is also generating challenges to the traditional technical job interview, where candidates are given programming problems as a way to assess their skills. And lately it’s become apparent that a lot of applicants are using AI to give themselves a boost, according to recent reporting from Business Insider's Amanda Hoover. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Hoover about the controversy over applicants using AI while interviewing for jobs that often use AI.
Fri, April 11, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — How tariffs impact consumer gadgets, e-commerce and the AI boom
The tariff rollercoaster has created a lot of uncertainty in the tech industry. We're digging into how its playing out for makers of consumer tech, e-commerce platforms and AI. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these topics for this week’s Tech Bytes.
Thu, April 10, 2025
Etsy's AI curates the search for the perfect thing
Etsy, the online marketplace known for selling one-of-a-kind handmade items, is hoping that artificial intelligence can boost sales of those crafty creations. The site has been selling less stuff and recently announced a plan to double down on high-quality and unique merchandise over cheap and mass-produced. Now, it's launching AI-curated product collections, based on trends like island luxe or maximalism. They build on the work of human trendspotters, using AI to scan the site and tag thousands of matching products. Nick Daniel, chief product officer at Etsy, explains what the company calls algotorial curation to Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.
Wed, April 09, 2025
What does a bear market mean for Big Tech?
After President Donald Trump's launched his “Liberation Day” tariff agenda, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite stock index suffered its biggest plunge since March 2020. The so-called Magnificent 7 — Nvidia, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla — lost a combined $1.8 trillion of market value in two days. The tariff-induced downturn in business conditions is likely to be temporary, according to Daniel Newman, CEO and chief analyst at the Futurum Group, a tech research and advisory firm. Newman told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that tech consumers might feel more of the pain, but not much can stop corporate AI adoption and the data center buildout.
Tue, April 08, 2025
Microsoft wants to be the world's AI platform
Microsoft celebrates its 50th anniversary this month. The company started as a small software startup co-founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in an Albuquerque, New Mexico, garage. It went on to revolutionize personal computing, business productivity and now — it hopes — artificial intelligence with its big investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Microsoft has set about integrating the technology across its products, and it recently unveiled a slew of upgrades to its Copilot AI assistant. They include Memory, which retains personal details like the foods you like or your kids' birthdays and can use that information to make your dinner reservations or pick out a gift. The Vision upgrade enables the AI to analyze photos and video and provide tips on, say, redecorating your kitchen. Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's consumer chief marketing officer, to learn more about the new features.
Mon, April 07, 2025
How to ethically design a nuclear power plant
Rising demand for electricity, largely to power the artificial intelligence boom, has stirred a resurgence in nuclear energy. Older plants like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania are being brought out of retirement, but there’s also investment in smaller-scale reactors with different designs. The fresh interest in nuclear generation has also renewed discussion about how to build these facilities ethically, in other words, with an approach that’s sensitive to the needs of the community and the world at large. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Aditi Verma, assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan, who co-created an undergrad course about ethically designing modern nuclear facilities. Verma discussed her effort to train young engineers to transform the industry. For some engineers, it’s also renewed a discussion about how to build these facilities ethically. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Aditi Verma, professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan who co-created a course for undergraduate students about how to ethically design modern nuclear facilities, about why it’s so important to be teaching this to young, would-be engineers now.
Fri, April 04, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — TikTok’s new bidders, Tesla sales slump and OpenAI raises $40 billion
OpenAI — the maker of ChatGPT — keeps raising more money, this time in a $40 billion round led by SoftBank. We’ll get into the strings attached in Marketplace “Tech Bytes — Week in Review.” Plus, what’s going on with Tesla’s sales slump? And how much is its polarizing CEO, Elon Musk, to blame? But first, the clock is ticking on a TikTok sale. The extended deadline, which may or may not be a real deadline according to President Donald Trump, is coming Saturday. As of this episode’s recording, the hugely popular short-form video app was supposed to find a U.S. buyer or be banned, and plenty of suitors have thrown their hats into the ring. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, about all these topics and more.
Thu, April 03, 2025
Why LGBTQ+ teens, young adults feel safer online
There’s been mounting concern in recent years about the harms of social media use for kids. The sites can be addictive, ripe for cyberbullying and contribute to increased rates of body dysmorphia, anxiety and depression. The growing evidence has led at least a dozen states to pass laws attempting to restrict access to online platforms for kids. The Kids Off Social Media Act, a bipartisan bill in the Senate, would bar minors under 13 from social media. But despite the risks, there can be benefits to finding communities online, especially for LGBTQ+ teens and young adults. A recent report jointly released by the Born This Way Foundation and the nonprofit Hopelab found that young people in these demographics felt significantly safer expressing their identities online compared to in-person spaces.
Wed, April 02, 2025
Worry over worker visas goes viral in Silicon Valley
Registration for the H-1B visa lottery closed last week. The tech industry has long been the biggest beneficiary of this program for specialized workers. But uncertainty has been spreading due to the Trump administration’s restrictive stance on immigration policy. Even legal immigrants have felt the crackdown. It’s led some companies to advise their H-1B holders not to leave the country for fear that they could be barred from returning. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Gerrit De Vynck, who wrote about risks to the visa program for The Washington Post.
Tue, April 01, 2025
Napster lives on
Yes, Napster is still alive and kicking. The peer-to-peer file-sharing company that became synonymous with music piracy in the early 2000s was bought by a company called Infinite Reality Labs last week for about $207 million. It’s the latest in a string of attempts to revive the brand. After it was shut down by the courts in 2001 and declared bankruptcy, Napster returned as a music subscription service, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens and now a virtual reality-metaverse destination. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Harry McCracken, global technology editor at Fast Company, who has been following Napster from the beginning. He says the brand still has some power.
Mon, March 31, 2025
China sets its sights on AI leadership
Chinese President Xi Jinping is pushing for the country to be a global leader in artificial intelligence by 2030 as Beijing competes with Washington to gain an edge in advanced technology. The release of AI chatbot DeepSeek, which stunned industry experts in January, gave a boost to China’s hopes of catching up to the U.S. despite restrictions on the advanced chips used to power AI.
Fri, March 28, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — Trump officials’ Signal leak, 23andMe goes bankrupt and chatbots take on search engines
AI company Anthropic recently added web search to its chatbot Claude. It joins other artificial intelligence tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT in delivering one clear answer to a web search query instead of pages and pages of links. Plus, 23andMe declared bankruptcy. So what’s gonna happen to all that genetic data? But first — the Signal group chat heard round the world. A Trump administration official appears to have inadvertently invited a journalist into a conversation about sensitive national security issues on the secure messaging app Signal. The app does offer end-to-end encryption, the gold standard for security in consumer-level messaging apps, but that doesn’t make it foolproof for the most sensitive of data. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, to break down all these topics for this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”
Thu, March 27, 2025
Network effect: Customers help utilities build smarter, more efficient power grid
On today’s episode of “Marketplace Tech,” Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Daniel Cohan, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, about virtual power plants. These aren’t physical generating stations. They’re more of a network, usually managed by a local utility, that aggregates electricity from different sources like businesses or homes. Essentially, these customers give energy back to the grid or help the utility balance supply and demand. As electricity demand grows, thanks to power-hungry AI data centers, electric cars and extreme weather, some providers are turning to virtual power plants to reduce strain on the grid.
Wed, March 26, 2025
The SEC invites cryptocurrency supporters and skeptics to the table
Last Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission held its first-ever crypto roundtable, a discussion with industry leaders and skeptics to answer a grand question: how should the SEC regulate crypto? Should SEC officials regulate crypto tokens like bonds and stocks? The agency under President Donald Trump is taking what many see as a friendlier approach to cryptocurrency and has already dropped a number of lawsuits against various crypto exchanges initiated during the Biden Administration. Axios reporter and author of the Axios Crypto newsletter, Brady Dale, returns to the show to discuss why the question of regulating crypto like a security asset is a very complicated one to answer.
Tue, March 25, 2025
AI chatbots mimic human anxiety, study finds
There’s a lot of hope that artificially intelligent chatbots could help provide sorely needed mental health support. Early research suggests humanlike responses from large language models could help fill in gaps in services. But there are risks. A recent study found that prompting ChatGPT with traumatic stories — the type a patient might tell a therapist — can induce an anxious response, which could be counterproductive. Ziv Ben-Zion, a clinical neuroscience researcher at Yale University and the University of Haifa, co-authored the study. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino asked him why AI appears to reflect or even experience the emotions that it’s exposed to.
Mon, March 24, 2025
Workers hope to steer giant Southern EV battery plant toward unionization
The electric vehicle industry in the Southeast is growing rapidly, with increased sales, charging stations and manufacturing. Buoyed by notable victories in the last couple of years, the United Auto Workers union is revving up efforts to organize the EV and battery sector in the South. One target is a sprawling campus in rural Kentucky that, once completed, will be one of the largest EV battery plants in the world. A supermajority of workers at BlueOval SK has asked the National Labor Relations Board for a vote on joining the United Auto Workers. The nearly $6 billion electric vehicle battery campus in Glendale, Kentucky, is part of a joint venture between Ford and South Korea’s SK On.
Fri, March 21, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — Nvidia’s new bot, evaluating AI models in health care, and a health tech company preps its IPO
The stock market has been a tad volatile lately. But this month, the digital physical therapy company Hinge Health filed for an initial public offering. Plus, a new tool out of Stanford University evaluates how various AI models perform in real-world health care. It grades them on tasks from patient education to clinical note generation. But first, Nvidia just hosted its annual GTC confab, where it announced a whole lot of collaborations and, of course, some new and improved chips. Main takeaway: The company has its fingers in a bunch of AI pies. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino discusses all of this with Christina Farr, managing director at Manatt Health.
Thu, March 20, 2025
More Stanford grads are finding jobs and purpose in defense tech
Stanford University has long been a feeder for the neighboring tech industry with graduates often heading to a brand name of Silicon Valley. But the times, they are a-changin’, according to writer Jasmine Sun. She reported recently for the San Francisco Standard that building tech for the military has become cool on campus. One student, Divya, said her “most effective and moral friends are now working for Palantir.” Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Sun about how this shift compares to when she attended Stanford in the late 2010s.
Wed, March 19, 2025
Ransomware’s new strategy: naming and shaming victims
Federal officials are warning consumers against a type of cyberattack that’s been on the rise. It’s called Medusa, a ransomware program that uses tactics like phishing to infect a target’s system and encrypt their data, which hackers then threaten to publicly release unless a ransom is paid. Medusa is just one example of how hackers are evolving their strategies at a time when federal cybersecurity resources are being cut by the Donald Trump administration. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Lesley Carhart, director of incident response for North America at cybersecurity firm Dragos, to learn more about the use of embarrassment as a weapon and the impact of funding cuts on digital safety.
Tue, March 18, 2025
The do’s and don’ts of payment apps
You could say once your company becomes a verb, you’ve arrived. And “Venmo me” is a pretty common phrase these days. Mobile payment apps like Venmo, along with Zelle and Cash App, are becoming pretty widespread, especially among young people. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, consumers under the age of 25 were twice as likely to have used some kind of mobile payment app compared to older Americans. But as with any form of money, there is etiquette about how to use them. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Yanely Espinal, host of Marketplace’s “Financially Inclined,” a video podcast that provides money lessons for teens, about the do’s and don’ts of these payment apps.
Mon, March 17, 2025
Schools are using AI tracking software on student devices, recent investigation shows
Back when the pandemic first hit, many students received tablets or laptops from their schools. Schools also wanted to know what students were doing on those devices, so demand for AI-powered software to monitor students’ digital activities also grew. That surveillance software is the subject of a new investigation from the Associated Press andTthe Seattle Times, whic Claire Bryan coauthored. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes asked her what sort of things this surveillance software might flag.
Fri, March 14, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review – AI that reads emotions, Waymo expands its services, and the industry pushes back on federal tech cuts
We are taking a look at how the tech industry is pushing back against federal cuts to artificial intelligence and science. Plus, Waymo is expanding its self-driving services in Silicon Valley. But first, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba this week released an AI model called R1-Omni, which the company says can read human emotions. Alibaba shared a demo on the coding platform GitHub that accurately described a character as being angry and experiencing fear. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes is joined by Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at venture firm Collab Capital, to break down these stories.
Thu, March 13, 2025
Futurist couldn’t predict our inability to plan for the future
This week, we’ve been exploring the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, we spoke about what might happen with futurist Amy Webb, the CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group. She predicted, among other things, that we would give up more personal data around our health and location. Then on the show in 2021, she said more definitively that privacy was dead. This week, Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Webb again. They discussed the current state of digital privacy, the lessons not learned from the pandemic and, as Webb sees it, the victory of politics over planning.
Wed, March 12, 2025
The pandemic made teachers learn to love tech
In the spring of 2020, 77% of American public schools moved to online distance learning when the pandemic hit, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education. Prior to the pandemic, you could say that schools were trickling into the digital age. Then, when COVID changed everything, they were basically tossed into it. Some educators adapted quickly, like Bebi Davis, who was working as a vice principal in Honolulu at the time. She’s now principal of Princess Victoria Kaiulani Elementary. Going totally virtual, she said, meant introducing an onslaught of technology — videoconferencing, classroom management software and messaging systems. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes asked Davis about the school system’s experience adopting so much tech all at once.
Tue, March 11, 2025
Keeping remote workers close to the action
Five years ago today, after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, there was a widespread shift to remote work for many workers who were considered nonessential. And people had to get used to seeing their colleagues mainly on a screen. In recent years, some companies have required employees to return to the office full time. But remote work remains a major part of many people’s lives, far more than in 2019. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Anita Blanchard, a professor of psychological and organization science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, about what’s lost when workers don’t interact in the same physical space.
Mon, March 10, 2025
How the pandemic gave a huge boost to wastewater virus tracking
March 11 marks five years since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 virus officially a pandemic. Tracking the virus has been key to understanding where outbreaks are occurring and one tracking tool that had been mostly on the shelf prior to the pandemic is wastewater surveillance. That’s pretty much what it sounds like — testing what we flush down the toilet which eventually lands in what’s known as a sewer shed. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with molecular virologist Marc Johnson at the University of Missouri about the advantages of wastewater surveillance. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Fri, March 07, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review – Tariff tensions hit tech stocks, TSMC expands its U.S. investment and a tech leader joins bid to buy TikTok
In this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” TSMC announced it’s investing an additional $100 billion to make chips in the U.S. Plus, a co-founder of the social media platform Reddit joins a bid to buy TikTok. But first, let’s talk about the stock market. A number of tech companies watched their stocks sink this week, when new tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada were put in place. That volatility continued when President Donald Trump backtracked on the policy, at least temporarily. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, to unpack these stories and more.
Thu, March 06, 2025
Maryland’s message to Big Tech: Think different.
Today, we’re wrapping up our series “The Infinite Scroll,” where we look at kids’ lives on social media and the risks and rules they face. One approach some states take to creating rules to mitigate risk is known as an age-appropriate design code, a law that puts the onus on tech companies to design products that keep kids safer when they’re on the internet. California passed its Age-Appropriate Design Code Act in 2022, as did Maryland last year. Both have been challenged by lawsuits from the tech industry. State Delegate Jared Solomon, a sponsor and lead author of the Maryland law, explained to Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes that the oversight effort attempts to prevent manipulation by algorithms. He hopes the industry will begin to “think differently about how they design their products.”
Wed, March 05, 2025
Can close connections with AI chatbots harm kids?
On our new series “The Infinite Scroll,” we’re looking at the rules and risks of kids using social media. Artificial intelligence is showing up on these platforms in the form of chatbots, digital characters you can text or talk with. Today we explore what can happen to youngsters who interact with them. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes discussed the subject with Meetali Jain, founder and director at the Tech Justice Law Project. Her organization is involved in a lawsuit against Character.AI, an app that enables users to create and communicate with these bots.
Tue, March 04, 2025
Parents want their kids to be social, but with less social media
This week, we are looking at how kids use social media and the risks and rules around it. It’s part of our new series “The Infinite Scroll.” Monday, we talked about how habitually checking social media can change adolescents’ brains, making them more sensitive to feedback from their peers. Today, we’re going to look at what it’s like to be a parent monitoring their kids’ social media. One thing’s clear: It can be a lot of work.
Mon, March 03, 2025
Youngsters’ social media habit has developmental impact, researcher says
Social media takes up a huge chunk of kids’ lives. A 2024 study from Pew found that about half of U.S. teenagers are online “almost constantly.” It’s a big source of stress for parents too, and policing their kids’ actions on these platforms can take up a lot of time and energy. Also, there’s AI, and it’s showing up on social media as bots that are always available to talk. We’re going to get to all of that this week in our new series about what it’s like to be a kid on social media and the risks and rules that come with it. We call it “The Infinite Scroll.” We’re kicking things off with Eva Telzer, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Telzer told Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes about the intensity of youngsters’ connection to their phones and its effects on how the kids are wired, which may last into adulthood.
Fri, February 28, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — Apple’s huge investment, Nvidia’s strong earnings and Bybit hack batters bitcoin
In this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” chip powerhouse Nvidia saw its revenue soar last quarter, showing that the AI boom is still booming. Plus, it was a bumpy week for bitcoin after the crypto exchange Bybit lost almost $1.5 billion of digital assets in a hack. But first, Apple announced it’s spending $500 billion to expand manufacturing and create jobs in the U.S. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, about what the investment could do for American tech manufacturing and more.
Thu, February 27, 2025
As followership wanes, TikTok resets relations between creators and fans
Patreon, a company that enables fans to directly support internet creators financially, has produced a report looking at how creators and their fans are feeling these days. One finding: Fans say they’re seeing more short-form work on social media, even though they prefer long-form content. And more than half of creators surveyed say it’s harder to reach their followers now than five years ago. This is part of what the report calls the “TikTokification of the internet.” Brielle Villablanca, vice president of communications and creator advocacy at Patreon, discusses the trade-offs for creators in the current TikTok-driven environment with Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes.
Wed, February 26, 2025
If AI writes code, is coding still crucial for kids to learn?
For years, coding has been thought of as a useful skill for children to learn. It’s integrated into computer science classes and a number of organizations are dedicated to helping kids code. But now, AI tools can write code themselves. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Monica McGill of the Institute for Advancing Computing Education about what the expanding capabilities of artificial intelligence mean for coding as a necessary — or not so necessary — skill.
Tue, February 25, 2025
How will Australia’s teen social media ban work?
Last year, Australia passed a measure that would ban children under 16 from using social media. That’ll be a big shift: About 80% of Australian kids between the ages of 8 and 12 used social media in 2024, according to a report from Australia’s online safety regulator. The government is now working on the details of how to implement what many are calling one of the strictest age restriction policies in the world. The BBC’s Naomi Rainey reports on the difficulties of enforcing the ban and the impact it could have on kids in the future.
Mon, February 24, 2025
Satellites provide internet access and a lot more, but the skies are getting crowded
Satellite internet has been around for decades. But in just the past six years, the number of satellites orbiting the planet has grown dramatically. Many belong to Starlink, a unit of SpaceX whose satellites are in low Earth orbit. And it’s expected to get even busier up there with Amazon’s Project Kuiper launching thousands of new satellites. Joe Supan of CNET recently wrote about this. He told Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes about the race to claim a piece of space and the risk of high-tech debris clogging the zone.
Fri, February 21, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — deep cuts at AI agency, DOGE sued again and pulling the plug on the Ai Pin
Another lawsuit hits the Department of Government Efficiency from privacy rights advocates concerned about Americans’ personal data. And another wearable — the Ai Pin — bites the dust. But first, layoffs by the federal government are continuing, including, reportedly, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, which is part of the Commerce Department. This is a federal laboratory that’s been around since 1901 whose mission is to promote U.S. innovation and competition. And part of its work is to help create standards for new technology, like artificial intelligence. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories. Curi recently reported that NIST is expected to fire about 500 workers. But what does NIST do, exactly?
Thu, February 20, 2025
Responsible ways to use AI for government efficiency
The Washington Post reported earlier this month that representatives of DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency — gained access to sensitive data at the Department of Education and fed it into AI software. This has raised red flags over whether it violates federal privacy law. We reached out to DOGE for comment, but didn’t hear back. But there are ways to use AI to improve efficiency without raising privacy concerns. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Kevin Frazier, contributing editor at the publication Lawfare, about how the government has used AI in the past and how it could use it more responsibly in the future . The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Kevin Frazier: The federal government’s use of AI really spans decades, if we’re going to be honest, because how you define AI is a whole, other hour-long conversation, if not two-hour-long conversation. But here we can even just look back to the end of 2024 when we had an inventory done of the federal government’s use cases of AI, and what we saw is that across 37 agencies, there were more than 1,700 different uses of AI, ranging from the Army Corps of Engineers using AI to predict flooding to, of course, the Department of Defense using AI to bolster its cybersecurity defenses. Stephanie Hughes: Tell me a little bit more about, you know, what the goal is with incorporating AI into the federal government, like, what’s the hope? Frazier: Yeah, so there are tons of hopes. I think the biggest advantage to relying on AI systems are a couple things. So number one, AI is really adept at spotting patterns that would otherwise elude human staffers, and so AI deployed in the federal government setting can really assist with efficiency when it comes to identifying waste, trying to forecast new trends, whether those are market trends or weather trends. So a lot of this just goes to trying to do really large, difficult tasks in a more streamlined and reliable fashion. One thing I want to point out is that AI operates the same way in any given context. We can see what its function is. We can know it’s going to run in a certain way. Now I’m not trying to say that AI is perfect, far from it. We know that it can be susceptible to bias and other issues, but it does have that capacity to operate in a more predictable fashion and serve different tasks that humans just aren’t really well suited for. Hughes: Going big picture, the use of AI in many aspects of life, including government, seems inevitable.
Wed, February 19, 2025
The cost of losing government webpages and public data
404: Page Not Found. That error message has become a more common sight on government websites. Many — reportedly thousands — of federal government webpages were recently taken down, ranging from Census Bureau research on depression among LGBT adults to Food and Drug Administration guidance for making clinical trials more diverse . These erasures come after President Donald Trump signed executive orders cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and what he calls gender ideology. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jack Cushman , director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and a contributor to the End of Term archive project , which works to preserve government sites before a new administration takes over. They discussed his recent work archiving those sites and data sets and what’s lost when these digital artifacts are not properly archived. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Jack Cushman: I think one way to put it is that a great deal has been archived, and especially [by] the End of Term archive. Another way to put it is that a great deal has not been captured. We’re talking about a government of 2 million people who generate data in the course of doing their work, and whatever their work is, they’re going to report out to us as their ultimate employers. Here’s what I saw, here’s what I recorded, here’s how you can get access to a copy of it. So we’re talking about an infrastructure that is much larger than there’s any ability for the external community to make a copy of, so if we, in a serious way, if we shut off access to all of the data that the government has created for us, that we paid for, then we’re going to end up not having a copy of most of it at the en
Tue, February 18, 2025
When venture capital collides with the nation’s capital
Venture capitalists have been welcomed into the Donald Trump administration, and their presence is growing. People who’ve been in the business of backing startups have been tapped to run the Office of Personnel Management and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission . Another, David Sacks, is the White House artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar . Even the vice president , JD Vance, spent time making venture deals before he moved into politics. Sarah Kunst, founder and managing director at Cleo Capital, says that in venture capital, you have to be good at saying no and comfortable taking risks knowing they likely won’t pan out. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes asked Kunst what it means to bring these qualities to the federal government. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Sarah Kunst: I think that that’s probably going to be a bit of a culture clash. The government and the people in America shouldn’t sort of be treated to a culture where it’s fine if 90%-plus fail as long as one or two does incredibly well. And regardless of political leanings, I do think that you ignore your base at your peril, and I don’t think that the average American wants to feel like it’s fine that they’re worse off, as long as one or two Americans are doing better than ever. Stephanie Hughes: I want to ask just sort of about technology generally. You know, in Silicon Valley, there is this mindset of, why do with a person what you could do with technology? I don’t think they mean that meanly. It’s just kind of their jobs, to a certain extent. But if we have more venture capitalists working in the federal government, what do you think that will mean for the workforce and the amount of technology that we see? Kunst: I mean, the idea that you always want people over technology is demonstrably not true. And we know that every time we get in a car and choose to drive somewhere versus walk. And so it’s not that all technology is bad and you always want people powering things. That being said, there needs to be a thought of, what are the checks and balances here? What are we giving up when we’re bringing in automation or when we’re bringing in technology? And then, more importantly, and I think this is the hard part for tech, is the technology ready to be responsible for the lives or the salaries or the well-being of hundreds of millions of our fellow Ame
Mon, February 17, 2025
Are we ready for ‘grief-tech’?
This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC. Lottie Hayton lost both her parents within two months of each other. As a young journalist she wanted to write about it, and in particular to investigate a new tech genre known as “grief tech,” or “ghostbots”. An industry is emerging that uses artificial intelligence to build chatbots of people who’ve died with the aim of offering solace to those who’ve lost loved ones. Hayton made a chatbot version of her dad and a visual talking avatar of her mom. “My drive to try it was, I guess, in order to provide other people who might be using it with information,” said Hayton. “The bot sort of blinks and moves slightly like she did, that was quite alarming. The face moves in a juddery way but it very much looked like her and that threw me off,” she added. “It had an air of her, but it was definitely robotic. I was inherently aware that this was a piece of technology.” Within the last five years, the idea of digital resurrections have gone from science fiction to reality. Anyone can sign up to create a digital chat version of loved ones for as little as $10. Lifetime subscriptions, however, can cost several hundred dollars. Justin Harrison set up his ghostbot business, You Only Virtual, after his own mother became ill. “For anybody tech-savvy, it’s a pretty easy process, extracting text messages and emails and online messages,” Harrison said. “Our technology is nowhere near as good as it’s going to be in six months, in a year. Generally speaking it’s going to be mind-blowing in three years.” This industry is still very new and still pretty niche. Businesses operating in this field only have a few thousand users and there’s not a huge amount of investor interest. But some experts believe that ghostbots could go mainstream. Carl Orman is a Swedish researcher and author who has spent the past 10 years studying the ethics of the digital afterlife. “Five years ago I would have said that most people would still find it kind of creepy. But then ChatGPT hit,” said Orman. “It’s not implausible that over the next decade or so, interacting with chatbots impersonating real humans becomes just as common as having a video call and that’s going to open up a new market for those chatbots. “ Experts are now calling for studies to find out if these tools can really help us with our grief, and if they do, figure out how companies might offer that ethically, consensually, and safely.
Fri, February 14, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — AI talks at Paris summit, Apple launches health study and BuzzFeed’s social media plans
On this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we’ll talk about Apple launching a new health research study and BuzzFeed starting a new social media platform. But first, the U.S. is pushing back against global AI regulation. This week there was a kind of who’s who of AI and government at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly said there should be rules for this technology and that AI cannot be the Wild West. But the country that’s home to the original Wild West wants to forge ahead. U.S. Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech underlining the Donald Trump administration’s intent to develop AI without worrying about the risks. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at the venture firm Collab Capital, about these topics for this week’s “Tech Bytes.”
Thu, February 13, 2025
Will DeepSeek disrupt American AI’s first-mover advantage?
There’s a concept in business called the first-mover advantage. Basically, it means that if you’re the first company with a successful product in a new market, you have the opportunity to dominate the market and fend off rivals. But that advantage can be short-lived. Take Netscape, which produced Navigator, the first popular commercial web browser. Then Microsoft entered the field with Internet Explorer, and it wasn’t long before Navigator crashed. In the world of AI chatbots, two of the first movers are OpenAI and Anthropic. But recently the Chinese company DeepSeek made a splash with an AI chatbot that it reportedly developed for a fraction of what its competitors have spent. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with historian Margaret O’Mara, author of the book “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,” about whether America’s artificial intelligence industry should be worried about newcomers like DeepSeek. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Margaret O’Mara: There’s this dimension of foreign competition [that] also brings to mind the late ’70s and early ’80s in the U.S. semiconductor industry that was suddenly freshly challenged by advanced chips coming out of Japan, which was kind of a surprise. Japanese chipmakers were taking some technologies developed in the United States to develop complex chipmaking, and assisted by subsidies from the Japanese government, came to market and were able to rapidly undercut American chipmakers on price and really had Silicon Valley on the ropes for a few years in the early 1980s with this very fierce competition. So the DeepSeek saga brings to mind this earlier geopolitical moment, and I think there are some interesting similarities. Stephanie Hughes: It’s way too early to make any pronouncements on where companies like OpenAI will land after this, but it does raise the specter of companies like Netscape and [social media pioneer] Friendster, who were sort of first, but certainly didn’t last forever. What factors could determine if American AI companies, you know, go the way of Friendster or if they can enjoy their first-mover advantage? O’Mara: What I’m watching is, you know, how costly is it going to be to continue to develop these advanced models? And by cost, I don’t just mean cost of the consumer. I mean cost [of] energy, how efficient the hardware is. The capital expenditures of the largest tech platforms are mind-boggling, that kind of massive investment of capital and material is, you know, it’s not sustainable. It’s not sustainable from an environmental and energy-consumption standpoint, and also not kind of sustainable from a capital-expenditure standpoint. So I think that’s the real challenge, that it’s become so expensive to be a player in this. And there has to, what DeepSeek is pointing towards, is there is possibly another way
Wed, February 12, 2025
The AI boom is carving space for the data centers economy
Data centers are filled with servers, basically a bunch of beefed-up computers stacked on top of each other in buildings that can be as big as warehouses. So they need a lot of electricity. And there are more of those projects in the works. For example, Meta has said it’s planning to build out at least one data center that’s going to be so big it could cover a good chunk of Manhattan. Wall Street Journal tech reporter Meghan Bobrowsky explained to Hughes what kinds of companies are benefitting from this data center construction boom.
Tue, February 11, 2025
AI pressures professions to accept artificial expertise
About 1 in 4 U.S. jobs requires an occupational license, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures . Licensing requirements differ by state and can apply to everyone from barbers to lawyers. The general idea, of course, is to keep unqualified workers out. But technology, and specifically artificial intelligence, is making inroads. Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, is also author of the new book “ The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong .” She told Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes that in some instances, AI is letting consumers bypass licensed workers altogether. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Rebecca Haw Allensworth: This has been true for a while, but it’s really become intense now that AI is what it is. You can go on ChatGPT and say something like, write me a contract for funeral services, and ChatGPT will spit out a contract. That has forever been the practice of law, and that’s been limited, until this point, to people who have a license in law. Stephanie Hughes: But now AI is kind of getting in on that practice of law, even though there have been lawsuits to try to stop it. Allensworth: Yeah, it’s hard to know who to sue. So if you were not a lawyer, if you were just an unlicensed person, and you were writing contracts for people, the [bar association] might come after you and say, you’re engaged in the unlawful, unlicensed practice of law, and you have to stop. A cease-and-desist letter. With technology these days, it’s a little bit hard to figure out who was writing that contract. Should I get in trouble for asking the prompt? Should [ChatGPT developer] OpenAI as a company have some liability for this? And if that were the case, how on Earth would we figure out what actually is happening at the company level? So, yeah, it’s breaking down some of the barriers of licensure, and I think it’s really unclear how the professions are going to respond. Hughes: What’s the worry here? Like, the worry is that the bots are not licensed by any particular professional board and maybe don’t know what they’re doing — is that the concern? Allensworth: Well, I think there’s two concerns. The first concern is that somebody getting legal advice or a contract written by a bot is going to get bad advice. But the other concern, I think, is on behalf of the profession itself. If that contract is a straightforward, easy thing that can kind of be pulled together by the bot, then that’s a really inexpensive way for me to get a little bit of legal help. And lawyers don’t like that because that will, at the end of the day, undercut their bott
Mon, February 10, 2025
The complicated business of changing digital map names and boundaries
Geography has been part of President Trump’s agenda. His first day on the job, he signed an executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and Denali, the highest peak in North America, will now go back to being called Mount McKinley. Private companies that make maps — analog or digital — don’t have to follow suit but at least one is. Google said in a post on X that it has long had a practice of applying name changes from official government sources. So, once the official federal naming database is changed, it’ll update Google Maps for people in the US. Marketplace Tech reached out to Google, Apple and Microsoft for a statement clarifying their approach to renaming bodies on their digital maps. Apple and Microsoft did not provide one. Google redirected us to their X post. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with, Sterling Quinn Professor of Geography at Central Washington University, about whether tech companies generally have standard operating procedures around name changes. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Sterling Quinn: 10 to 20 years ago, when online maps were newer, we saw these companies putting out long, detailed statements and policies about how they were going to handle disputed boundaries and place names, almost like they were kind of aiming for a single correct depiction of the world. And over time, as they received feedback from people who don’t agree sometimes over the boundaries and place names, I think they realized it was more complicated, but also they wanted to be able to maintain their business operation in the smoothest way. So their statements changed over time, to talk about how their changes would support the company’s mission or local market expectations, and that was actually closer to the truth of what they started doing. So over time, their statements about how they handled disputes have kind of gone away, and we just see little glimpses in them now and then, like the posts that Google put on X last week explaining how it was going to handle this change. Stephanie Hughes: And I mean, is the goal basically to avoid controversy? That Google doesn’t want to be in the business of naming naming places? Quinn: I think we have to kind of step back and ask ourselves the question, why are most of the maps that we use these days made by big tech companies? These maps were built as part of a business that supports search and advertising. If you can attach search results or advertising to a location, that’s very powerful, and it also takes a lot of technical resources to build a multi-scale, fast map of the world that you can serve out to billions of people, and only a few companies have the ability to do all of that. And so we wind up in this situat
Fri, February 07, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — Google’s AI policy pivot, OpenAI teams up with California colleges, and robotaxis arrive in Austin
On this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we’ll explore OpenAI’s inroads in higher education. Plus, how passengers can get on a waitlist to hail a driverless car in Austin, Texas. But first, a look at how Google is changing its approach to artificial intelligence. In 2018, the company published its “AI principles,” guidelines for how it believed AI should be built and used. Google originally included language that said it would not design or deploy AI to be used in weapons or surveillance. That language has now gone away. Google didn’t respond to our request for comment, but it did say in a blog post this week that companies and governments should work together to create AI that, among other things, supports national security. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, about these topics for this week’s “Tech Bytes.”
Thu, February 06, 2025
The case for a comprehensive federal law to oversee AI
Congress considered 158 bills that mention artificial intelligence over the past two years, according to a count by the Brennan Center for Justice . But zero comprehensive AI laws have been passed. There has been movement by states, however. In Tennessee, for example, the ELVIS Act, which protects voices and likenesses from unauthorized use by AI, became law in March. In Colorado, a law that takes effect in 2026 requires developers of high-risk AI systems to protect consumers from algorithm-based discrimination. But some who fund AI technology say a federal law is needed. That includes Matt Perault , head of AI policy at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The following is an edited transcript of his conversation with Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes. Matt Perault: We think it’s really important at the current moment to have a national competitiveness strategy for AI policy. We’re at a Sputnik moment right now with the release of DeepSeek, and we’re not going to be able to do that if we have a state-by-state patchwork where companies have to comply with different laws in different states. Our focus at Andreessen Horowitz is on Little Tech companies, so small companies and startups that are at the cutting edge of innovation and we think are going to help define the AI products of the future. For those companies, it’s particularly challenging for them to try to figure out, how do I comply with the law in California that might conflict with the law in Texas that might be different from the law in Florida? Stephanie Hughes: Say more about that. How would navigating a patchwork of state laws even work when it comes to AI? Perault: That’s the question — it doesn’t function particularly well. Like, if you think about other tech products that you use, like a messaging service, for instance. If you’re located in Baltimore and I’m located in Durham, North Carolina, and we’re sending communications back and forth, we want that to function seamlessly regardless of where we live. We don’t want to have a different experience in Maryland than the one that we have in North Carolina. And it’s the same thing for AI products. We are used to having tech products that function across borders. That’s actually one of the value propositions of many technology products, that it increases and improves communication and allows us to communicate more cheaply and easily. And having a patchwork where companies need to figure out, what does it mean when I build an AI product in one state versus in another, would be really challenging. Hughes: AI laws can go in a lot of different directions. What do you
Wed, February 05, 2025
A veteran of Reagan’s “Star Wars” has doubts about Trump’s “Iron Dome”
Among President Donald Trump’s many executive orders is one calling for a “next-generation missile defense shield.” The White House calls this the Iron Dome for America. The order says it should defend against all sorts of missile attacks and include “space-based interceptors” that could potentially act as both sensors and weapons. It reminded retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Latiff of a Ronald Reagan-era program he worked on: the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, known popularly, and especially to its critics, as “Star Wars.” Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Latiff about whether the U.S. has the technology, money and time to make this grand project work. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Robert Latiff: Yes and no. Yes, we do have sensor technologies. We have the launch technologies. Whether or not we have the technologies to lash it all together and make it work, I think, is an open question. Stephanie Hughes: And President Trump has compared this to the defense shield used in Israel. Israel is about the size of New Jersey. The United States is about the size of the United States — many New Jerseys. You know, we’re talking about something way bigger and different kinds of protections too, right? Latiff: Yeah. So I think the use of the term “Iron Dome” for this one was, was really misleading because the Iron Dome in Israel, it can protect an area of about 150 square miles against targets that maybe are 35 or 40 miles away, short-range ballistic missiles that aren’t going very fast and don’t have any countermeasures necessarily. There’s even some controversy over how good it is. Israel swears by it, others say maybe it’s not as good as they claim. Hughes: So the secretary of defense has been instructed to come up with a plan that includes a budget. How much would something like this cost? Latiff: I look at what was proposed in the EO, and I have actually, sort of myself, referred to it as “Star Wars 2.0.” This is very, very much like the old Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative. The estimates for SDI were all over the map, but even some conservative organizations admitted that it was probably going to be more expensive than SDI thought. I would say, probably in the area of $750 billion to a trillion. And I’ve based that on looking at previous estimates for some of the pieces of SDI. Hughes: And how much time would it take to develop something like this — develop and then, I guess, deploy? Latiff: Advocates claim, you know, five, six, seven years. I think it’s probably longer than that, just given the history of acquisition projects. But I think 10 years would probably be a reasona
Tue, February 04, 2025
Artificial ingredient: Cooking up new snacks with aid of AI
One of the more hopeful scenarios for how artificial intelligence could affect jobs is that it would take over more of the boring grunt work and free up humans for loftier pursuits. Mondelez, the company behind many of America’s favorite snacks, like Oreo cookies, Sour Patch Kids candy and Ritz crackers, is trying to do just that — using AI to speed up innovation for food scientists and give their taste buds a break. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Wall Street Journal reporter Isabelle Bousquette about how AI is changing the snack game . The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Isabelle Bousquette: When they are, you know, creating these new recipes, it used to be a process that was, you know, fairly trial-and-error based, and the process is still fairly similar now with this AI tool, except what the AI is doing is it’s giving the scientists the ability to actually go in and tick the box for the flavor characteristics that they’re looking for. They can tick a box if they want it to, you know, taste more buttery or more oily or eggy, or have more chocolate chips, or be rounder, less round, or, you know, it’s really endless, like the amount of characteristics they can tick there, and they don’t all apply to, like, every product they create. And they’re still kind of taste tested. There’s a lot of human in the loop, but it’s basically making that whole process, like, four to five times faster. Meghan McCarty Carino: So how has it kind of changed the workflow of food scientists working in this? Bousquette: It’s still developing, so it won’t necessarily be used in every product that comes to market. I think they have a rule that if they’re changing fewer than three or four ingredients, it’s maybe not worth [it] to go through the tool. You know, there’s several people involved in the process, and they’ll sort of work with brand stewards to make sure that they’re not, you know, pushing the remit beyond the core of, you know, say, what an Oreo should be. But yeah, essentially it’s, you know, just making the process a lot faster and, you know, just getting them those recipes, that they used to have to put in the manual work to do, in a more automated way. McCarty Carino: Yeah, tell me more about some of the limits for this tool and some of the maybe challenges that have been encountered. Bousquette: Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the things is like they have to give the tool a lot of their own data, of which they have a lot because they’re a massive company. You know, [in] earlier iterations of the tool where maybe they didn’t give it enough data, it would suggest things that were, you know, way out there, like a cookie that was, like, almo
Mon, February 03, 2025
Reimagining the long-term alignment of human and AI advancements
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, has long been the holy grail of innovation — a synthetic intelligence with all the capabilities of a human mind or more. Recent advances in AI have many predicting we could be closer to achieving it than we’re ready for. It’s a reality that preoccupied the late diplomat Henry Kissinger before he died last year at 100 years old. He collaborated with Eric Schmidt, formerly at Google, and Craig Mundie, formerly at Microsoft, on the new book “ Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit .” Mundie joined Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss what a future with superintelligence might look like. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation: Craig Mundie: As it relates to the government issues, it affects many things. As we’ve seen in the applications to misinformation, people can use it to try to affect how democracies work. On the other hand, authoritarian governments [may] say, well, this is the greatest thing ever in terms of me being able to keep track of my people, or watch them or control them in some way. The impact on warfare, I think, will be profound. While in the current environment, we still tend to focus mostly on kinetic warfare, I think in the age of AI, we’re going to see that more and more this will become focused on cyber warfare, the ability to disable a society in its entirety will come more likely from cyber means than from kinetic means. And the emergence of superintelligence becomes empowering for people on both sides of that, whether you’re on the offense or the defense. And so in the book we talk a little bit about the fact that you really have to stop and think, how does this evolve? And to some extent, what should governments be doing about it? We said there is a window of time that we think is not all that long, where governments have to come to realize that much has happened, for example, with nuclear weapons, where we built them all and then realized this could be a problem, not because we might still shoot at the Soviets or vice versa, but they came to realize that if you just let these things proliferate willy nilly, then it was really hard to keep track of what other people might do with them. And then that began a 70-year-old regime of non-proliferation and controls on those. And I think we’re ultimately going to have to come to the same realization here, that there’s going to have to be some agreement by the the governments, at least, that have the greatest investment and progress in this area, that they’re going to have to come together and realize they’re better off thinking about how to control this for the benefit of humanity collectively than strictly for the benefit of any one of the countries or governments. And so there’s definitely going to be a te
Fri, January 31, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — DeepSeek, chip tariffs, and an attempt to get kids off social media
Everyone was obsessed with the new white whale of the AI world this week. We’ll get into it on today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, Trump floats tariffs on semiconductors from overseas. And a bipartisan Senate bill to ban kids from social media is getting another look. But first, back to that DeepSeek drama. The Chinese AI company took the world and the markets by storm with claims that its class-leading large language model was built at a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley rivals. DeepSeek claims it spent only $6 million on compute power — at least 16 times less than leading U.S. companies. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these topics for this week’s Tech Bytes.
Thu, January 30, 2025
Trump renews interest in crypto “meme coins”
President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been seen by many as a boost for cryptocurrency. During the campaign, he made several crypto-friendly pledges and recently made a splash when he launched his own “meme coin” shortly before the inauguration . The Trump token reached a nearly a $15 billion valuation, though it has since fallen quite a bit. But it continues to provoke questions , like, is creating this investment vehicle a conflict of interest for a high-ranking official? And what the heck is a meme coin anyway? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios reporter Brady Dale, author of the Axios Crypto newsletter, to get some answers . The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Brady Dale: They’re a speculative instrument that, I sort of view them as a game. You know, there are these cryptocurrencies that capture an idea. So the most famous one is dogecoin — that funny dog that everyone sees all over the internet — and then, you know, these days there’s this blockchain called Solana that’s very fast and easy to use and cheap to use. And this app was spun up called pump.fun that made it very easy to just create new meme coins, like super, superfast. And so thousands get created every day. And it’s just a game where people, you know, watch the new ones come out and ask themselves, which of these ideas is the funniest, which of these ideas is the catchiest? And they buy some, you know, making a bet that they can pick it correctly. And then, you know, these coins typically don’t last very long. Sometimes they do, but typically they don’t. And so you’re trying to, like, guess which ones will grab everyone’s attention. If it does start to go up, you try to sell at the right time because you sort of assume it’s not going to last forever. So it’s this big, massive gambling game that people are playing together because right now, in crypto there’s nothing else really interesting to do other than buying bitcoin, because bitcoin has had a good year or so, but that’s not that exciting. And so people are looking for, you know, people in this space like fun stuff to play around with. And so that’s been meme coins for the last many months. Meghan McCarty Carino: All right, and we’re discussing this now, of course, because of President Trump’s meme coin, which he launched the weekend before the inauguration. How did that go? Dale: Well, it really exploded. At first, a handful of people made a ton of money off of it. A bunch of
Wed, January 29, 2025
How Trump’s executive order on online free speech could upend content moderation
Amid all the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump during his first week in office came a promise to “restore freedom of speech” and end federal censorship. Keen observers may note that freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution. But the order seems to have something more specific in mind. It calls out what it characterizes as the Biden administration’s pressure campaign on social media companies to “moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech under the guise of combatting misinformation.” Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer at The Washington Post, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that the order is a signal of the president’s continued focus on content moderation online . The following is an edited transcript of their conversation: Will Oremus: What [Trump is] doing, though, is equating censorship with online content moderation and rules around what people can say online. And in particular, he uses the executive order to assert that the Biden administration abused its power when it talked with tech companies, or potentially pressured tech companies, to take down certain types of misinformation, conspiracy theories, mostly stuff around COVID-19 and the vaccines, and some around January 6 and the 2020 election. Meghan McCarty Carino: And this is kind of a practice that has come to be called jawboning . Oremus: That’s right. So jawboning is an older term , but it refers to when someone in government uses their position of authority to try to influence the decisions of private companies. It’s not a legal term, there’s no law against jawboning, but when you’re jawboning private companies around their decisions about speech, that could be a form of censorship by proxy, depending on how it’s done. However, when the government is telling social media companies, or if the government were telling social media companies, what their speech policies should be, then that could be deemed government censorship. And so that was at issue in a case that came to the Supreme Court last year called Missouri vs. Biden. And so Trump is going back to that and saying, that was, in fact, censorship and we’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore — even though the Supreme Court actually did not say that it was censorship. McCarty Carino: This Trump order calls for investigating the actions of the federal government during the Biden administration, to look for free speech violation
Tue, January 28, 2025
“Superagency” explores how AI can enhance human potential to new heights
There’s no shortage of bullish voices on artificial intelligence among the titans of tech. But even many of the leading evangelists, in addition to prevailing pop culture narratives, tend to strike a note of impending doom when envisioning the future of the technology. Reid Hoffman wants us to consider the alternative. He’s the co-founder of LinkedIn, and a founding investor and former board member of OpenAI before he branched into other ventures, like Inflection AI. And his new book “Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future?” explores those alternatives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Hoffman about what he means by the idea of “superagency.”
Mon, January 27, 2025
At Davos, rich and powerful now comfortable with power of AI
Last week’s annual gathering of the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was a bit overshadowed by the inauguration of Donald Trump in the U.S. The president made a virtual appearance at the conference, delivering a speech that hit on several of his recurring themes: tariffs, inflation and artificial intelligence. AI has been a big topic at the summit for several years. But the way it was treated this year felt different, according to Reed Albergotti, tech editor at news website Semafor. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino caught up with Albergotti just as he was wrapping up his reporting at Davos.
Fri, January 24, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — The Stargate project, Trump meme coins, and the TikTok flip-flop
There’s been quite a firehose of news this week, but we’re going to distill some of it into a nice, tall glass for you on today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” We’ll dig into why some crypto insiders are upset with President Donald Trump over his preinaugural meme coins. Plus, the latest in the TikTok ban rollback and how Congress might respond. But first, amid the flurry of executive orders the president signed during his first week in office, he announced the Stargate project, a private, multiparty venture to build domestic artificial intelligence data centers. In attendance at the White House were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. The investment could be as much as $500 billion. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, for her take on these stories.
Thu, January 23, 2025
As LA blazes rage, even firefighters turn to Watch Duty
Getting fast, comprehensive and accurate information is crucial during emergencies like the devastating wildfires still raging in the Los Angeles area. And over the last two terrifying weeks, one app has become the place to find it: Watch Duty. Operated by a nonprofit, the app was launched in 2021 to track wildfires in Northern California and now provides coverage for more than 20 states. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with David Merritt, Watch Duty’s chief technology officer, about how it all came together.
Wed, January 22, 2025
How one college is leveraging AI for educators and students
The explosion of artificial intelligence tools like chatbots has rocked the education world in the last couple years. It’s spurred efforts to prohibit, detect or otherwise build guardrails around these powerful new tools. Some educators, though are embracing them, and Colby College is doing it on an institutional level. Four years ago, before most of the public had ever heard about large language models, this private liberal arts college in Maine established a cross-disciplinary institute for AI to help educators and students integrate the technology into their curricula in an ethical way. We had the college president on back then to discuss, and today we wanted to check back in — this time with Michael Donihue, interim director of the Davis Institute for AI at Colby College.
Tue, January 21, 2025
Trump’s election syncs up with tech backlash against gloom and guilt
There’s been a lot of doom and gloom in the tech sector in recent years — the feeling that so many of the advances in internet connectivity, social media and now artificial intelligence might have caused more harm than good, increasing the need for at least caution in the industry and even, possibly, government intervention. But lately a backlash to the backlash has been brewing among techno-optimists. Their movement is called effective accelerationism, a play on the effective altruism community, and its supporters argue that unrestricted technological progress is a force for positive change. It’s received more attention since Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nadia Asparouhova, a writer and researcher who’s been following the rise of the effective accelerationist subculture, often shortened to e/acc.
Mon, January 20, 2025
Biden pushed back on Big Tech’s power, and Trump found a few new friends
It’s Inauguration Day, and a veritable who’s who of tech are in attendance for the swearing in of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. The massive presence of tech leaders, overtly supporting or just making nice with Trump, represents a stunning reversal from his first term. Today, we’re looking back at what happened in between. President Joe Biden was often seen as taking an adversarial approach to the tech industry.
Fri, January 17, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — TikTok shutdown, Biden’s AI policies and Zuckerberg asks Trump for a favor
On this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes,” we’ll dive into President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence plus a request Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made to President-elect Donald Trump. But first, tech news site The Information reported that TikTok plans to completely shut down its app in the U.S. on Sunday and will instead direct users to a website where they can read about the platform’s ban. According to that reporting, TikTok will allow American users to download their data — and, if the ban is overturned down the road, those users will be granted access to it immediately. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories.
Thu, January 16, 2025
California’s wildfire detection tech was no match for the Palisades fire
California relies on a variety of tools to stop and mitigate wildfires, some as low-tech as dumping giant buckets of seawater on the flames. But on the higher-tech side is a new, AI-powered monitoring system called ALERTCalifornia, which was developed at the University of California, San Diego. It’s designed to speedily detect and report wildfires using a network of over 1,000 cameras and sensors. The developers say the network detected over 1,200 blazes across the state during the 2023 fire season, sometimes with impressive quickness. But the system wasn’t quick enough to prevent the current disaster in Los Angeles. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Cyrus Farivar, a senior writer at Forbes, who explored how the fury of the Palisades fire overwhelmed that human-made system.
Wed, January 15, 2025
Donors need protection too as wildfire misinformation and scams emerge
As fires burn in Los Angeles, many people are going online to find ways to support people who have been temporarily or permanently displaced by the disaster. But like we’ve seen in the aftermath of recent hurricanes and floods, bad actors are spreading misinformation and financial scams. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at the cybersecurity firm McAfee, to learn more.
Tue, January 14, 2025
How AI chatbots are turning the tables on scammers
Scam calls about fake warranty renewals, non-existent credit card bills and more are still a global problem. But some companies and telecommunication providers are turning to AI chatbots to intercept the calls before they ever reach a real person. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino recently spoke with Dali Kaafar, founder and CEO of Apate AI, an Australia-based company creating these chatbots, about how his company is designing these bots to scam the scammers.
Mon, January 13, 2025
Will AI replace call center workers?
Since large language model chatbots hit the scene a few years ago, there’s been a lot of speculation about which jobs they might disrupt most. A lot of bets were on customer service. And recent data show they are becoming more common in the space. A Salesforce survey found a 42% increase in the share of shoppers who turned to AI-powered chatbots for customer service during the 2024 holiday shopping season compared to the previous year. But as AI becomes more powerful and more human-like, will AI voice agents become the norm, even for those more complicated customer cases now handled by human agents? The BBC’s Elizabeth Hotson looked into what a future of synthetic customer service might look like.
Fri, January 10, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — Meta’s users take over fact checks, YouTubers sue PayPal and highlights from CES
CES wraps up in Las Vegas this week. That’s the annual convention where some of the most cutting-edge consumer tech is unveiled. And while we still don’t have a prototype for Rosey, the housecleaning robot from “The Jetsons,” we’ll get into some of the big robot reveals for today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, YouTubers are taking PayPal to court. A class-action suit alleges that the payments company is messing with their commissions on affiliate links. But first, Meta made big changes to its content moderation policy this week. Facebook’s parent company said it’s cutting ties with third-party fact checkers and switching to a community notes system like the one X uses. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, about her takeaways from the announcement.
Thu, January 09, 2025
Meta pivots to community fact-checking ahead of Trump term
This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced some big changes to content moderation strategy. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp will no longer be contracting with third-party fact-checkers from the media and nonprofits as it has since 2016. Instead, Meta will follow the lead of X under Elon Musk and rely on crowd-sourced Community Notes to provide additional context on posts. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with David Gilbert, a reporter at Wired who covers online disinformation and extremism, to learn more about Meta’s latest pivot.
Wed, January 08, 2025
A Dutch port demonstrates how automation in the industry could work
U.S. ports could be facing another strike as the deadline looms next Wednesday to settle a union contract for 45,000 dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts. A major sticking point has been automation. Proponents argue that technology can make ports cleaner and more efficient; critics point to lost jobs, high costs and mixed productivity results. While the cost-benefit analysis of port automation is complicated, there are places where the model appears to be succeeding, like Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
Tue, January 07, 2025
Why 2025 may be the year of small AI
By now you probably know the term “large language model.” They’re the systems that underlie artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT. They’re called “large” because typically the more data you feed into them — like all the text on the internet — the better those models perform. But in recent months, there’s been chatter about the prospect that ever bigger models might not deliver transformative performance gains. Enter small language models. MIT Technology Review recently listed the systems as a breakthrough technology to watch in 2025. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to MIT Tech Review Executive Editor Niall Firth about why SLMs made the list.
Mon, January 06, 2025
With OpenAI seeking profits, activist seeks payback to the public
A battle is brewing over the restructuring of OpenAI, the creator of pioneering artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. It was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with the goal of developing AI to benefit humanity, not investors. But advanced AI requires massive processing power, which gets expensive, feeding into the company’s decision to take on major investors. Recently, OpenAI unveiled a plan to transition into a for-profit public benefit corporation. That plan has drawn objections from the likes of Elon Musk, Meta and Robert Weissman, co-president of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, which urged California authorities to ensure that as OpenAI reorganizes, it will repay much of the benefits it received as a nonprofit.
Fri, January 03, 2025
Bytes: Week in Review — Trump’s bid to delay TikTok ban, OpenAI’s advances and a tech prediction for 2025
OpenAI closed the year with a bang, announcing a new, powerful AI model called o3. It could mark a significant step toward artificial general intelligence — an advanced form of AI that can learn or understand anything a human can. Plus, we’re mulling another tech prediction for 2025 — will AI assistants actually make our lives easier this year? But first, President-elect Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to put the TikTok ban on hold so he might negotiate a deal to save the app in the United States. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these topics for this week’s Tech Bytes.
Thu, January 02, 2025
Not all AI is, well, AI
Artificial intelligence and promises about the tech are everywhere these days. But excitement about genuine advances can easily veer into hype, according to Arvind Narayanan, computer science professor at Princeton who along with PhD candidate Sayash Kapoor wrote the book “ AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference .” He says even the term AI doesn’t always mean what you think. The following is an edited transcript of his conversation with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino: Arvind Narayanan: AI is an umbrella term. It refers to a collection of loosely-related technologies. So many different products are called AI. In some ways, AI has certainly made remarkable progress. But in other cases, what is being sold as AI, first of all is 100-year-old statistics, simple formulas that are being rebranded as AI; but more importantly, it’s being used in situations where we should not expect AI or any other technology to work, like trying to predict a person’s future. So in the criminal justice system, AI is used to predict who might commit another crime if they are released before their trial, and if they’re deemed too risky because the algorithm predicts they might commit another crime, then they are detained. And you know that could be months or years until their trial. And that’s just one example. It’s used in the health system. It’s used in automated hiring. So in so many cases, these kinds of predictive technologies, they can pick up some basic statistical patterns in the data, that’s true, but they are not at the level of predictivity where we think it’s morally justified to be making these incredibly consequential decisions about people. Meghan McCarty Carino: Let’s talk about predictive AI, or automated decision making, where you kind of have your most potent criticisms. These are systems that use machine learning to try to predict, say, who is most worthy of a bank loan or who would be the best fit for a job or who is likely to commit crimes. What makes these applications of AI so problematic? Narayanan: So let me make one small distinction here. Yes, these are all areas where predictive AI is being used. But, look, I mean, banks have to determine who is more risky and who is less risky. And if they make no distinctions between applicants, they will probably go out of business. So in some cases, yeah, we have to apply some sort of prediction, but in other cases, it’s really not clear to us why we’re treating this as a prediction problem. In hiring, the way we used to do hiring is we insist on certain minimum qualifications and then we interview the person, and we come to a nuanced human understanding of how well the things they bring into this job will contribute to what we want them to do. And that’s really hard to turn into a pure prediction problem in th
Wed, January 01, 2025
Not all screen time is created equal (rerun)
This episode originally aired on August 19th, 2024 . Six years ago, Apple introduced a new feature on iPhones and iPads: The Screen Time Report. The notification pops up every Sunday and it informs iPhone users with a handy graph — just as they’re trying to relax before a stressful week — that they have once again failed to reduce their phone time over the past week. The feature promised to empower users to manage their device time and balance the things that are really important. But is it actually doing that? Caroline Mimbs Nyce, a staff writer at The Atlantic, recently wrote about why she thinks Screen Time is the worst feature Apple has ever made. She told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that it sometimes feels like Screen Time is doing more guilt-tripping than empowering these days. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Time is just sort of a weird way to measure our relationship with our devices. We have these sort of magical smartphones that come with a lot of utility, but they also come with a lot of distraction. So, figuring out how to regulate that is not just a question of time, but actually one of really being thoughtful about what are the positive and the negative use cases of a phone? How does it make me feel? And that actually matters a lot when we’re talking about health outcomes. Meghan McCarty Carino: Yeah, the addition of the Screen Time feature seems to be kind of an admission by Apple that they know that there can be some negative effects of being on your phone too much, and they wanted to allow users to “ take control ” of the time they spend on their devices. Does this actually do that? Mimbs Nyce: A spokesperson for Apple did not respond to my question about whether or not they have any evidence that Screen Time helps people reduce the time spent on their phone. So, it’s sort of unclear. I don’t know if there are any good studies that really track time, but what we do know from the broader health literature is that all of this stuff is really context dependent. So, you could have someone using their phone for Google Maps and someone who’s using it to doom scroll and having anxiety or depression because of that. But even on an app level, it’s really hard to tell. So, you could have someone that uses Instagram and they have a group chat with their friends and they’re
Tue, December 31, 2024
Futurist forecasts convergence of key technologies into “living intelligence”
2024 was all about the artificial intelligence boom. That was true for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, but also the case on a wider, more practical level, with AI becoming increasingly visible in our schools, offices and social media feeds. AI advances are sure to remain a massive part of the tech economy, but in the coming year, we could see more sci-fi-like tech becoming reality, according to futurist Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Webb about some of the emerging trends she’s watching for in 2025 , including a potential evolution in AI tech that she calls living intelligence. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Amy Webb: This year, everybody has been focused exclusively on artificial intelligence as the next big thing, and the issue is that artificial intelligence is already here, but worse, it’s actually connected to two other critical areas of technology that haven’t gotten as much attention. Those are advanced sensors and biotechnology. Together, artificial intelligence as the foundation with sensors and biotechnology are kind of creating yet another new field of technology, one that I’m calling living intelligence. And basically, living intelligence creates systems that can sense and learn and adapt and evolve, which means that as technology progresses in one of those fields, it sort of creates this flywheel effect. Living intelligence is going to drive an exponential cycle of innovation, of growth. It will disrupt businesses. It will change our reality, and it won’t happen overnight, but we’re at the beginning of a long-term cycle where living intelligence will play a pretty significant role. Meghan McCarty Carino: Paint a little bit of a picture for me of what this might look like. How is bioengineering and sensors and artificial intelligence all put together in this? Webb: So there’s a nationwide shortage of nitrile gloves. These are the gloves that you encounter at a restaurant or at a doctor’s office. The problem with nitrile gloves is that they require basically a handful of ingredients that are hard to source, specifically in the United States. There’s just no way for us currently to keep up with the demand. Now, what if there was a different way to produce the substance, the rubberlike substance that goes into these nitrile gloves? In fact, there is, and that’s because of living intelligence. In addition to all of the work that Google has done on artificial intelligence, they’ve also been working in the field of what’s called generative biology to generate molecules or genomes, right? New materials. And that’s exactly what Google has been working on , which means that in the near future, artificia
Mon, December 30, 2024
How content creators profit from rage-baiting
This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC . Have you ever found yourself angry or outraged at a piece of content on social media? A disgusting recipe or shocking opinion? It could be intentional. Social media influencer Winta Zesu freely admits that she provokes for profit. “Every single video of mine that has gained, like, millions and millions of views is because of hate comments,” she said. The 24-year-old estimates she made $150,000 last year by exploiting an online trend known as rage-baiting. “Literally, just if people get mad, the video is gonna go viral. I can make money on TikTok. Instagram is paying, like, YouTube pays you. So I was like, OK, I’m just gonna post everything on every platform.” She’s part of a growing group of online creators making rage-bait content, where the goal is simple: record videos, produce memes and write posts that make other users viscerally angry, then bask in the thousands, or even millions, of shares and likes. “The more content they create, the more engagement they get, the more that they get paid,” said Andréa Jones, a marketing strategist based in Toronto, Canada. “Even if, even if those views are negative or inciting rage and anger in people.” Experts say its popularity is due to the way the algorithms are designed, which determine what users see. “If we see a cat, we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cute.’ We scroll on,” Jones said. “But if we see someone doing something obscene, we may type in the comments, ‘This is terrible,’ and that sort of comment is seen as a higher-quality engagement by the algorithm.” But for Ariel Hasell, assistant professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan, the negatives are clear. “One of the things that we see happen is that people are sort of overwhelmed by negativity in these environments,” she said. “The concern is that long term, we won’t be able to get anybody’s attention and get them to pay attention to the things that we hope that they should be paying attention to.” We contacted the major social media platforms to see what they had to say about rage-bait on their sites. At the time of publication, we had no responses, but we do know it is on their radar. In October, a Meta executive took to Threads to report “an increase in engagement-bait” on the platform, adding, “we’re working to get it under control.” But if rage-bait continues to pay, it’s likely to continue to appear in our social feeds.
Fri, December 27, 2024
How China’s EV market could endure higher tariffs
It’s fair to say China dominates in electric vehicle sales. The country is the world’s biggest consumer of electric cars and has dozens of automakers competing in the space. Last year, Chinese companies sold about 9.5 million EVs and plug-in hybrid cars . But the industry faces mounting trade pressures. The Biden administration imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, which President-elect Donald Trump is expected to continue. Meanwhile the European Union recently raised tariffs up to 45%, citing concerns that Chinese government subsidies give its companies an unfair advantage. Subsidies certainly help, but there are other factors giving Chinese EVs an edge. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak about how those factors could keep Chinese EV makers competitive, even in a more restrictive global market. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Jennifer Pak: There are multiple factors, and different people will emphasize different points to it. So one of the things is China has a complete supply chain. It has cheap labor. There’s fierce competition amongst all of the Chinese companies here. There’s a big demand, a big market and subsidies. According to a consultancy, Automobility, they say that batteries account for over half of the cost of the EVs . So if you can imagine, China controls the processing of the raw materials all the way down to the assembly, it means you can negotiate good prices, especially if you order in massive quantities. So if you, you know, have more volume, then prices per unit comes down. And then there’s also cheap labor. So for example, in the U.S. last year, it was $28 per hour for an autoworker , whereas when we went to Central China, at one of the BYD factories in Changsha, we spoke to assembly workers who said they earned about $1,000 a month , which is pretty good for factory work in China, but because of the amount of overtime they have to put in, it works out to at best $3.60 an hour. So that’s quite a difference from $28 an hour. McCarty Carino: And when we say that <a href="https://
Thu, December 26, 2024
Yelp helped change the game for online reviews
As we close out the year and look ahead at 2025, we wanted to mark an anniversary of sorts: 20 years ago, the online review site Yelp was launched — the name reportedly a mashup of “help” and “Yellow Pages.” It started as an email service to send personal recommendations to your friends, then in 2005 morphed into the standalone review site we now know. Yelp wasn’t the first in the online review game, but it has been among the most popular and enduring. Andrea Rubin has been at the company almost from the beginning. She joined in 2006 as the first community manager in Chicago. She’s now the senior vice president for community nationally. “I absolutely loved my city and loved local businesses, and I just loved being able to share my thoughts on these local businesses through the Yelp platform,” Rubin said. “I was like, ‘Well, if I love this, I know there’s many other people who are going to love it as well.’” Yelp has now accrued almost 300 million reviews worldwide . And the site has helped usher in our current star-saturated era, said David Godes, a marketing and economics professor at Johns Hopkins University, noting “almost all of us, almost always check reviews when we’re making a purchase.” More than 90% of consumers do so before visiting a new business, according to a recent survey from Capital One. But as online reviews have taken on greater weight, Godes said there’s been a greater incentive to game them. “I guess you could think of it sort of as white hat and black hat,” Godes said., The white hat, ethical version would be encouraging consumers who seem satisfied to write reviews or giving them some sort of incentive to do so. The black hat, more sinister version? “Online networks of reviewers who get paid to write fake reviews,” Godes said. “This has been documented. Using AI to generate fake reviews, for example — lots of that going on.” Yelp uses a combination of algorithms and user reports to flag suspicious review activity so it won’t get recommended to users or factored into a business’ star rating. Content determined by moderators to be deceptive is removed, and a business page might be labeled with an alert. On average, about 10% of o
Wed, December 25, 2024
How teenagers can get hooked on sports betting (rerun)
This episode originally aired Sept. 23, 2024 . You might say online gambling has been on a winning streak since a Supreme Court decision in 2018 cleared the way for states to allow sports betting. It’s now legal in 30 states and its influence is hard to miss: Online sportsbook companies like DraftKings and FanDuel are on billboards, commercials even college campuses , many of which have made deals with sports betting companies. Three out of four college students gambled last year according to the National Council on Problem Gambling, and online betting sites are increasingly targeting young people. Yanely Espinal, host of Marketplace’s “Financially Inclined” podcast, recently covered this topic on her show, and she explained to Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino how online betting companies are reeling in younger users. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Yanely Espinal: So that’s where I think it’s most interesting and a little bit scary, because the physical space where people are going to see sports, especially young people with their friends, it’s like these physical spaces where the ads are popping up constantly. They’re around you, they’re always on TV and in commercials. And so, I think it’s getting more and more and more prevalent over recent years than really ever before. Meghan McCarty Carino: The last time you were on the show, we talked about “dark patterns,” these kinds of user designs that are intended to manipulate people into giving up something that they might not have otherwise, like their time or their money. That feels relevant here. How are these gambling apps integrating dark patterns? Espinal: Yeah, the tools that they’re using are almost identical. Like, you see when you scroll and something pops up right away, it’s like a treat, like a reward. And so, there’s a lot of pop ups. There’s a lot of rewards coming up, you spin this wheel to see what you get today. Or a notification will come up on your phone when you’re not even in the app, you click that notification, and even though you weren’t even thinking about it, you’re back in the app again. And then there’s all these rewards
Tue, December 24, 2024
Big Tech’s pivot away from diversity efforts (rerun)
This episode originally aired Sept. 11, 2024 . Over the last couple of years, the tech industry has slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs , many of them in recruiting and other departments that work to improve diversity. Companies like Meta and Google, which earlier set ambitious hiring and investment goals, have pulled resources from those efforts. As a result, many nonprofit groups set up to train and recruit underrepresented workers are struggling to stay afloat. One prominent person in the field is Lisa Mae Brunson, founder of the nonprofit Wonder Women Tech. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino asked her how things have changed. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Lisa Mae Brunson: We saw the writing on the wall where it seemed like companies were performative, despite the fact that, statistically, companies will perform better when they have diverse teams . Their bottom line will actually increase, they will make more profits . But that wasn’t really what they were looking at. I mean, I think they were looking at the fact that they were going to have to change culture. And you started to see the political climate change too. And I think when that shifted, the focus on increasing representation also shifted. Meghan McCarty Carino: And we’ve certainly seen a shift in terms of financial investment. Of course, over the last couple years, a lot of tech companies have been shedding jobs. Many of those jobs have been concentrated in [human resources], recruiting, diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Have you felt the effect of that in the work you do? Brunson: Oh, 1,000%. I mean, we had a pretty significant surge for a hot moment when George Floyd was murdered, and you saw all of these companies get together and focus on Black Lives Matter. But then once that momentum shifted and that political climate shifted, it was almost like night and day, just a complete reversal of all of the progress made over, over time. And then on a federal level, you see affirmative action being impacted, and it’s really harrowing to kind of bear witness to all of the possibilities that this work can do and create impact to seeing where people are just intentionally devaluing it. McCarty Carino: Right. You mentioned the end of affirmative action in college admissions, which was overturned by the Supreme Court last summer. How do you think that has affected kind of the corporate approach to these eff
Mon, December 23, 2024
A look back at 20 years of podcasting
Raise your hand if you kind of forgot where the word podcast comes from. The now-catchall term for digital audio shows goes back to the Apple iPod . And it’s been almost two decades now since Apple helped bring podcasts mainstream by adding them to iTunes. “We’re going to list thousands of podcasts and you’ll be able to click on them, download them for free, and subscribe to them right in iTunes,” said then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. So, what was the business of podcasting like at the beginning, and where might it go from here? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty asked Nicholas Quah, podcast critic for Vulture and New York Magazine. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation: Nicholas Quah: My understanding is that there wasn’t really a business model. A lot of the early podcasts were just people making stuff and posting stuff around. And the analogy of the blog that rose with the rise of Google AdSense, these spam ads that you see on the internet, that was the early form of monetizing blogs and websites. There wasn’t quite anything like that for podcasts at the time. That being said, this was mid-2000s. And late-2000s era also gave rise to “Dear Brothers” podcast networks, and they tried to sell ads directly into the show. But, of course, the big hurdle, is that nobody quite knew what a podcast was. It was a little hard to prove what the audience size was. For advertisers, it’s difficult to get a sense that if I paid you X amount of money to get X amount of impressions, can I trust your impressions? All of that was very difficult early on. Meghan McCarty Carino: I want to talk about some of the technical changes that kind of have changed the podcasting game — you know, the ability to stream high quality audio and the ability to have really good analytics of when people are downloading [and] listening. How did that kind of data start to affect podcasting? Quah: Well, we’re in the middle of still feeling that out. So if you ask anybody who works in the business, or anybody who covers this space, a constant refrain is that metrics in podcasting is still kind of all over the place. And I want to sort of lay the context here in a sense that this was part of the point, originally, of podcasting: the whole notion that it was sort of freestanding also meant that it was, yes, harder to sort of understand and study in terms of how many people actually download it and listened, and to what extent did they listen to each individual episode. But that created a system in which nobody could govern the destiny or the trajectory of the medium. To answer your question, [let’s] quickly go through
Fri, December 20, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — SCOTUS to hear TikTok case, Congress unveils AI roadmap, and the year ahead for robotaxis
The House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence released a lengthy report this week that doesn’t recommend any specific policies or bills. We’ll also look ahead at what the new year could bring the robotaxi business. But first, the TikTok ban is heading to the Supreme Court. A federal appeals court last week upheld the law that would ban the short-form video app if its Chinese owners don’t sell it by Jan. 19. TikTok asked the court to weigh in, and this week SCOTUS agreed. Lily Jamali, tech correspondent at the BBC, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss the news.
Thu, December 19, 2024
The good and bad of AI voice cloning
This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC. Voice cloning is becoming easier, faster and more convincing. Artificial Intelligence makes it possible to change the age of an actor’s voice, translate words into any language, and replace a voice lost through illness. But it’s also increasingly being used by criminals to impersonate a loved one, extort money or compromise bank accounts. It’s changing how we communicate with each other and how we trust each other. Respeecher is a Ukrainian AI company at the forefront of cloning speech that’s indistinguishable from a human voice. They’ve worked on Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, cloning James Earl Jones’ voice for Darth Vader. And along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the company won an Emmy Award for turning an actor’s voice into President Nixon in the short film, “In Event of Moon Disaster.” Alex Serdiuk, Respeecher’s founder and CEO, said the process is much quicker. “We had to get several hours of Nixon’s voice from the Nixon library. Now we can do the same work with having just several minutes of it.” So how close to real time conversations are we? Serdiuk said we’re already there. “We have a piece of technology that allows change in real time, meaning that there’s only a very small delay and that would make it quite smooth for a phone conversation.” And Serdiuk said, there are other fields where the tech can change lives. “We’ve applied our real time models to things like technology for health care. For example, laryngectomy patients who went through throat cancer and had their voice box removed.” But Serdiuk adds a note of caution and said the technology needs to be controllable, so that bad players don’t ruin the market. “Some irresponsible companies let people create anyone’s voice within seconds and with such good quality that it would trick people.” A case in point is Jennifer DeStefano. Last year she told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about a frightening anonymous phone call she thought was a call for help from her daughter. Panicking, she told a friend, who called 911, which warned Jennifer there was <a href="https://www.keepersecurity.com/blog/2024/03/15/how-to-protect-yourself-from-ai-voice-scam-calls/#:~:text=The%20scammer%20calls%20their%20targeted,information%20or%20sending%20t
Wed, December 18, 2024
The entrepreneur who wants to buy TikTok
About 170 million U.S. users could be TikTokless as soon as Jan. 19. Early this month, a federal appeals court upheld a law that could ban the very popular short-form video app unless its Chinese owners agree to sell it. They have a willing buyer, though, in billionaire Frank McCourt, who has assembled a consortium of investors ready to put down more than $20 billion. He’s the founder of the internet reform initiative Project Liberty. You may also know him as a real estate developer who once owned the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Tue, December 17, 2024
Nuclear power needs to build up its workforce so it can power up clean energy
The artificial intelligence boom and its hunger for electricity has brought a surge of interest in nuclear power. Microsoft, for instance, made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Google and Amazon have invested in companies developing small, modular reactors. The Joe Biden administration’s Department of Energy aims to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050 , but the sector will need a lot more workers to make that happen. By some estimates there’s a gap of more than 200,000 jobs to fill over the next decade. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Craig Piercy, CEO of the American Nuclear Society, to learn more about the hunt for talent and why many younger workers are fired up about joining the industry. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Craig Piercy: What I like to say is there are the lab coats and there are the hard hats, and so it starts from nuclear engineers and very highly educated and trained scientific and technical professionals, which make up, I would say, a small but important percentage of the overall workforce, but I’d say the bulk is in the skilled trades — pipefitters, welders, metalworkers, fabricators. And then you have all the indirect layers of employment beyond that, so supervisors, security guards, technicians, other people that are involved in keeping the nonnuclear parts of a nuclear plant running. So it certainly runs the gamut. Meghan McCarty Carino: Tell me more about how we got to this point where we have this kind of gap to close. I mean, clearly the demand for nuclear is expanding. What about the kind of the supply of those in the workforce? What has that been like over the, you know, the near past? Piercy: Yeah, if you look at the demographic distribution of the nuclear workforce, it looks like a double-humped camel. You have this prime generation that came into the industry in the 1960s and ’70s, in nuclear’s heyday. And then, of course, after [the 1979 nuclear accident at] Three Mile Island, you had a significant drop-off in the number of people coming into the industry. Then we have this younger generation who are late m
Mon, December 16, 2024
The download on Trump 2.0 and tech
As we approach President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next month, questions are coming up about how his second administration will deal with tech. A lot has changed in the industry and its relationship to the former president since his first go-round. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Reed Albergotti, tech editor at the news site Semafor, to help us decode some of the signals . They started with artificial intelligence and the man Trump has named as his AI czar, venture capitalist David Sacks. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Reed Albergotti: I actually don’t think we really know at this point what the AI czar’s responsibilities are. I thought it was really interesting, the announcement of David Sacks focused on freedom of speech and sort of bias in AI chatbots. That’s been an issue that I think people have brought up on the right. I don’t know if that’s the focus. I mean, I would be surprised if the Trump administration is really going after this, you know, Manhattan Project for AI and they want to do these huge infrastructure projects, if the AI czar isn’t going to have some say in that. He’s also, I mean, very close with Elon Musk. And Musk is, as people may know, is building this massive AI data center in Memphis [Tennessee] that is possibly the biggest supercomputer in the world. He has to be thinking about this stuff in sort of that big geopolitical way Meghan McCarty Carino: When it comes to AI nationalism, trade is also something that comes up a lot, especially for hardware like semiconductors. How might the Trump administration use policy around chips as literally bargaining chips in foreign policy? Albergotti: There are all these countries now, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, to name a couple that really want to bolster their tech industries, their homegrown tech industries, by getting into this AI race and building massive data centers. I think they see their competitive advantage here being able to provide cheap energy, like the UAE has been building nuclear power plants like nobody’s business. They can, you know, cut red tape, but the Commerce Department has been very hesitant to allow Nvidia and other chipmakers to send their most advanced chips over to these countries, mainly because they’re worried that China has too much access and too much influence there. So these countries have become — and I think you’ll see more of them around the world — sort of these proxy battlefronts in the tech race with China. And it’ll be fascinating to see how the Trump administration plays that. And we just know that, you know, Trump likes to make a deal, and I don’t think he’s going to want to send these things over there without getting something in return. So I’m just re
Fri, December 13, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — Investments flow into health tech, FDA approves modifying AI medical devices, and California’s AI insurance claim law
There’s been a lot of discussion about health insurance over the last week. And one practice could be seeing more oversight: the use of artificial intelligence in coverage decisions. Plus, the FDA issues final guidance for makers of AI-enabled medical devices so they can now update their software after approval. And it was a good year for health tech startups — after a not-so-good year in 2023 — especially for those with the letters “AI” attached to their business. Our regular contributor Christina Farr, managing director with Manatt Health, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss the news.
Thu, December 12, 2024
Could AI and fintech help you get a bank loan?
Here’s another possible use for artificial intelligence: helping low-income consumers qualify for loans. These consumers may not have the required paperwork, or the documentation banks require in loan applications. Could AI and fintech help? Emily Williams , an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, wrote a pper bout this about this and discussed it at a recent Federal Reserve Bank of Boston conference. Her research focused on whether AI and fintech can help level the playing field for consumers who are left out of the traditional banking system; the unbanked. During a break in the action Williams tells me new technologies could make a difference. “We think about fintech sort of bringing down the cost of financial services, increasing competition, expanding the pie,” she explained. Williams says fintech apps that help you track your money and budget can also keep you safe from things like overdraft fees. Banks can use technology to broaden the pool of people they loan money to, using AI to decide whether to make a loan to someone who doesn’t have the typical data they look for – like your payment history on a mortgage or credit card. AI can help banks sift through a different trail of data — mounds of information on things like whether you paid your bills and rent on time. “AI can be used in that and is used in that to sort of to try to understand more deeply characteristics about people by looking at their patterns, the patterns in their data, essentially,” Williams said. But Williams says AI and fintech aren’t the end-all-be-all for people who are shut out of traditional banking. AI can be discriminatory. And lenders need to watch out for AI bias. For example… “We might be able to understand a person’s gender from just looking at their bank account transactions,” Williams told me. Williams says AI might make a lending decision based on gender. She says that’s illegal, but AI doesn’t know that. Also, you have to be tech savvy to use fintech. If you don’t have a smartphone and good internet access? Forget it. And Christine Parlour , a financial economist at Berkeley, says fintech probably wouldn’t help undocumented immigrants who are trying to open a bank account. “So, if the reason why undocumented aren’t in banks is because they don’t have documentation then fintechs are not going to help,” she said. With all of these caveats and what-ifs, Boston Fed President Susan Collins was cautious when I asked her about fintech and AI helping bring more people into the banking world. “I think there are reasons for skepticism and concern and there are also reasons for opti
Wed, December 11, 2024
Consumer agency seeks to limit data sales, combat “digital surveillance”
As consumers, we leave trails of personal data all over the internet. And collecting and selling it is big business. Sensitive information, like our Social Security numbers, incomes and credit scores, are often sold by so-called data brokers to the highest bidder. Sometimes that’s a bank, sometimes it’s a scammer. This month, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a rule that would crack down on the practice. It would bar companies from selling sensitive data or hold them to the same legal standards that apply to credit reporting agencies. Rohit Chopra, director of the CFPB, explained the proposal in more detail to Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Rohit Chopra: About 60, 70 years ago, we actually had the same problem of private detectives and other investigators researching all of us and creating files for sale about us. And people were really nervous about what could happen if this data was misused or if it had inaccurate information. That’s why when it comes to your credit report you have the right to look at it, you have the right to dispute incorrect information, and the companies creating them must make sure that the information in them is accurate. Meghan McCarty Carino: So data brokers would be restricted in buying and selling the most sensitive data, or they would basically be considered like a credit bureau? Chopra: Yes, so what we’re trying to make sure is that information, like your income, your Social Security number, this is really only shared for legitimate purposes, like accessing a loan offer. It can’t be used simply to sell our data to scammers who might be targeting older adults and others in financial distress, and it certainly shouldn’t be used to sell to state actors who are looking to collect information about U.S. citizens for nefarious purposes. McCarty Carino: So what are the implications of a data broker falling under the standards of a credit bureau? Chopra: Well, they’ll just have to come clean and not sell data that is not allowed under the law. They’ll have to make sure that if they’re maintaining information about your debt payments or other financial information, that they’re ensuring that that’s accurate, that they’re allowing you to dispute improper information, and they’re getting some meaningful consent for sharing that information as well, rather than burying permissions in fine print. The key here is that we don’t want these data brokers evading long-standing law on the books by pretending they’re something different. McCarty Carino: This proposed rule has met some resistance from some law enforcement groups. They’ve a
Tue, December 10, 2024
How police are experimenting with AI
The push to integrate artificial intelligence — like large language models — in the workplace is hitting almost every industry these days. And that includes policing. Reporter James O’Donnell with MIT Technology Review got an inside look at the ways in which many departments are experimenting with the new technology when he visited the annual International Association of Chiefs of Police conference back in October. The event, which bills itself as the largest gathering for police leaders in the U.S., is not generally very open to the media. But O’Donnell was able to attend for a day to see how artificial intelligence was being discussed. He said police are using or thinking about AI in a wide range of applications. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with O’Donnell to learn more about those applications, starting with AI-powered virtual reality training. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation: James O’Donnell : Rather than having instructors and actors come in and guide police departments through different scenarios, which could range from de-escalating a situation out on the street all the way to active shooter scenarios, the pitch is that VR can do that more realistically and in a more engaging way for police officers. And the one that I tried was a little bit lacking. You know, the company said they had some connectivity issues on the expo floor with their Wifi and internet and everything. And the point of the VR training was to to go through a de-escalation process with this person, to talk them down, to figure out what the issue was. And to be honest, I found it a little bit unconvincing. There was some lag involved, and I can see some of the benefits of it. But, you know, I think it’s still — like many pieces of VR and AR technology — I think it’s still sort of in the beginning [phases]. Meghan McCarty Carino : Another use you write about is kind of applying AI to analyze all of the many streams of data that are collected by police departments and increasing, you know, streams of data, tell us about how this might work. O’Donnell : Yeah, so this is a trend that is going on in not just police departments, but government more broadly, [like] the Department of Defense. And the idea is basically that every piece of hardware or every sensor that you can have out in the world is producing lots of data. So for police departments that could be cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detectors, all of these sensors that police departments are increasingly deploying collect lots and lots of data. But up until now, it’s been really hard to sort of sort through all of that data to find insights to make much use of it. And there’s a lot of companies who are pitching AI as sort of t
Mon, December 09, 2024
AI use surges in law firms, report says, creating an hourly billing paradox
One of the industries that is adopting artificial intelligence tools the fastest is the legal field. A recent report from the legal tech company Clio showed almost 80% of legal professionals are using AI in some way in their practice, up from about 30% last year. Joshua Lenon, a lawyer in residence at Clio, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino the profession is particularly ripe for tech disruption.
Fri, December 06, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review – OpenAI’s military deal, Intel CEO resigns and Amazon’s new carbon capture project
The CEO of Intel resigned this week, likely with a push from the company’s board. We’ll take a look at the landscape for U.S. chip manufacturing on today’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, Amazon is trying to make good on its net zero carbon emission pledges with a pilot to capture carbon at one of its data centers. But first, OpenAI announced this week it’s partnering with a military technology startup called Anduril. It’s just the latest AI company to get into the defense business. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, about all these stories and more.
Thu, December 05, 2024
“AI pimping” accounts are exploding on social media
We talk a lot about how the internet is filling up with AI content. And, of course, that includes the sort guaranteed to generate clicks and dollars: the adult variety. Platforms like Instagram have seen an explosion in sexy AI-generated influencers, and the people running those accounts sometimes steal content from real creators and mash them up with AI. The practice is called “AI pimping,” Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.
Wed, December 04, 2024
Why Google’s “smart city” failed
The Quayside development on Toronto’s waterfront was supposed to be the shining example of a tech-optimized smart city, an urban environment reinvented “from the internet up,” as it was described by Sidewalk Labs. That was a sister company to Google, which won a government bid in 2017 to modernize the 12 acres of former dockland. There would be robotaxis, heated sidewalks, adaptive traffic lights and lots of data collection. But in 2020, Sidewalk Toronto suddenly shut down before a single ribbon had been cut, turning a shining example into a cautionary tale. It’s all chronicled in a new book from Globe and Mail reporter Josh O’Kane called “Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy.” Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with O’Kane about what went on behind the scenes of the Sidewalk Toronto project.
Tue, December 03, 2024
Generative AI is impacting jobs across sectors, report finds
Ever since ChatGPT hit the scene a couple years ago, there’s been a nagging sense of dread for many: what will this mean for jobs? Well, new research from Imperial College London finds a shift already underway. Between July 2021 and July 2023, the report found freelance job postings for writing and coding decreased by about 20%. There was also a slowdown in freelance jobs for visual art. And it’s happening more quickly than past technological disruptions, Ozge Demirci, one of the coauthors of that report and a business professor at Imperial College London, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.
Mon, December 02, 2024
The year of “AI slop”
The internet has been overrun by AI content. The weirdly glowing and inadvertently surreal airbrushed images, the generic and oddly formal sentences peppered with factual errors and distracting phrases like “as of my last knowledge update.” So much of social media content these days has the unmistakable stench of “AI slop,” hastily spit out by image generators or chatbots to get a few likes. And while the phenomenon might seem harmless or sometimes even charming, the AI slop takeover of the internet is crowding out real information and human perspectives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox, about how AI slop is transforming social media.
Fri, November 29, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — Intel’s big grant, ChatGPT turns two and AI’s scaling problem
OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT turns two years old tomorrow. So how has it changed the tech industry and what’s next for the company? We’ll get into it in today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, we look into rumblings that improvements in AI have slowed, raising questions about whether we’ve hit a wall when it comes to training more advanced AI systems. But first, the Commerce Department finalized nearly $7.9 billion in subsidies for Intel. It’s the largest award yet under the CHIPS and Science Act and a potentially game-changing sum for the company right now. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, to break down these stories.
Thu, November 28, 2024
How one school in Ireland is trying to curb phone use among kids
A survey by nonprofit organization Common Sense Media shows 42% of children in the U.S. have a phone by the age of 10. And numbers like this are causing concern for educators, including a group of headteachers in Greystones, a town in Ireland. That group was so worried by the increased levels of anxiety among children using smartphones and social media that last year they asked parents to sign a voluntary pledge to delay buying cellphones for their children until at least the age of 11. The BBC’s Leanna Byrne checks in to see what effect it had.
Wed, November 27, 2024
Why Netflix is doing live TV
A 58-year-old Mike Tyson may have come up short in his ballyhooed comeback match against YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul. But Netflix emerged as a big winner, boasting 108 million viewers for the Nov. 15 spectacle, the most streamed sporting event in history. Unfortunately for viewers, Netflix’s livestream of the fight suffered buffering and lag problems. It wasn’t a great start for the platform, which will be livestreaming some much-anticipated NFL games on Christmas Day. But the streaming service has been leaning into more and more live content. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Lucas Shaw, who writes the Screentime newsletter at Bloomberg, about the event and what it portends for Netflix’s future live endeavors.
Tue, November 26, 2024
When political misinformation is an unwelcome guest at the holiday table
It’s an interesting time for many in the U.S. Some people feel great about President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, while others don’t. This week, people from both sides are sitting down together for Thanksgiving dinner. And while it’s one thing to ignore a family member’s social media posts or online rants, that can be a bit more challenging face-to-face, sometimes leading to awkward conversations about beliefs, truth and misinformation. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke to Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon, about how to navigate awkward conversations this holiday season.
Mon, November 25, 2024
To EV, or not to EV
The push for electric vehicle adoption got a bit more uncertain with the election of Donald Trump. While reports of “EV death” have been greatly exaggerated, sales growth has slowed, and carmakers have pulled back on aggressive targets. Now, it seems Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino may be part of that trend. She recently spoke with Jack Stewart, a former Marketplace reporter and the man who convinced her to buy an EV, about her decision to trade in her EV for a gas-powered car.
Fri, November 22, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — DOJ vs. Google, a bid to undercut internet safety, and X users flock to Bluesky
The social media app Bluesky is flying high this week as users disenchanted with Elon Musk’s X flee that platform post-election. That’s just one of the topics for today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” We’ll also get into Big Tech’s big-money lobbying effort to slow down a federal bill aimed at protecting kids online. But first, the latest in the potential Google breakup. This week, the Department of Justice proposed forcing the company to sell its Chrome browser. It’s one possible resolution to an antitrust case that has already ruled Google’s search business a monopoly. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories.
Thu, November 21, 2024
The algorithm behind health insurance denials
Some of the biggest health insurers in the country are turning to an algorithm to help determine if a medical claim will be approved. That’s according to a recent investigation led by ProPublica into EviCore, a contractor used to outsource prior approval requests for much of the insurance industry. The investigation found that EviCore tweaks an algorithm to increase the likelihood those claims will be denied, which means lower costs for insurers but more patients losing access to potentially lifesaving care. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller, who co-reported this story.
Wed, November 20, 2024
In the era of AI, photos aren’t what they used to be
Remember the old mantra from the early days of social media, “pics or it didn’t happen”? For more than a century, photographic evidence was about as close to a physical representation of the real world as we’ve had. But, thanks to new AI-powered photo editing tools – like the one now available on Google’s newest Pixel phones – anyone can create convincing pics of things that didn’t happen. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Sarah Jeong, a features editor at The Verge, who recently wrote about these cutting edge tools. Jeong says no one’s ready for the impact of this technology.
Tue, November 19, 2024
SpaceX engineered cheaper space flight, but startups are entering the market
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Elon Musk to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency. And the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who is also the owner of X, does have a record of wringing efficiencies out of his businesses. But the move raises many questions, like should someone whose companies benefit from federal dollars have a hand in making budget decisions? SpaceX alone has secured about $15.4 billion in federal contracts over the last decade, helping it become the dominant player in the industry. So, how has SpaceX rocketed ahead of the competition, and can anyone catch up? Ashlee Vance, the author of “When the Heavens Went on Sale” and a writer for Bloomberg, pointed to reusable rockets, an innovation that was on spectacular display when SpaceX tested its Starship system last month.
Mon, November 18, 2024
The dangers of designing AI chatbots to be human-like
Advancements in artificial intelligence have made it possible for the technology to mimic humans in ever-more convincing ways. But even far less sophisticated tools than today’s chatbots have been shown in research to trick our brains, in a sense, into projecting human thought processes and emotions onto these systems. It’s a cognitive failure that can leave people open to deception and manipulation, which makes the increasingly human-like technologies proliferating in our daily lives particularly dangerous, Rick Claypool, research director at the nonprofit Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.
Fri, November 15, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — SV takes DC, bitcoin’s historic rally and Reddit’s revenue rockets
It’s been almost eight months since Reddit went public, and since then, the platform known as the front page of the internet has been going gangbusters. We’ll get into why on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, crypto surges to new highs in the wake of the election. But first up, Silicon Valley is going to Washington. This week, President-elect Donald Trump tapped his favorite tech CEO, Elon Musk, as the co-lead of a new Department of Government Efficiency along with Vivek Ramaswamy, the former biotech entrepreneur and GOP presidential candidate. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Anita Ramaswamy, financial analysis columnist at The Information, for her take on these stories.
Thu, November 14, 2024
Apple will reportedly face EU fine under new competition law
Apple is reportedly facing a fine from the European Union, and it could be a hefty one. It’s the first Big Tech company to be slapped with a financial penalty under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which went into effect last year. The law, aimed at spurring competition in digital markets, requires Big Tech companies designated as “gatekeepers” to change policies that lock consumers into their products. Like, say, the walled garden of the Apple App Store. EU regulators ruled that Apple violated the DMA by failing to fully support app developers “steering” consumers to alternative marketplaces. It’s a story Matt Binder, a senior tech reporter for Mashable, has been following.
Wed, November 13, 2024
It’s not too late to change the future of AI
Gary Marcus is worried about AI. The professor emeritus at NYU doesn’t count himself a luddite or techno-pessimist. But Marcus has become one of the loudest voices of caution when it comes to AI. He’s chronicled some of the funniest and most disturbing errors made by current tools like ChatGPT, calling out the many costs – both human and environmental – of an industry that continues to accrete money and power. In his new book “Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us,” Marcus lays out his vision for a responsible path forward. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Marcus about that path and how it may be further out of reach, though not impossible, given the results of this year’s presidential election.
Tue, November 12, 2024
Understanding free speech in the online age
Do the free speech protections guaranteed by the First Amendment apply to online discourse? What if that online discourse spreads misinformation? Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, about how we should understand the right to free speech in the internet era.
Mon, November 11, 2024
For parents, school phone bans connect to many issues
This fall, California became the latest state to adopt a law banning cellphone use in schools. The Golden State joins more than a dozen that have imposed restrictions as alarm grows about the potentially harmful effects of smartphone use on students’ learning and mental health. Support for these policies spans the political spectrum. But one important constituency sometimes has a hard time adjusting: parents. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a columnist for The Cut, wrote about the challenges of disconnecting.
Fri, November 08, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — What a second Trump presidency could mean for the tech sector
The president-elect is also a former president who’s been a fixture in national politics for the last decade. But predicting what Donald Trump might have in mind for the tech industry in his second term based on that history, well, that’s a tough call. Trump has, at times, had strong words for some tech titans, cozied up to others, and pushed for — and then against — a TikTok ban. His first administration initiated several antitrust cases against tech companies, but Trump recently expressed skepticism about the potential breakup of Google after a federal judge ruled that its search business was a monopoly. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, a senior writer at Wired, about the future of tech antitrust policy and more in the second Trump term.
Thu, November 07, 2024
Patience for learning wanes as students make AI a habit
It has been almost two years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene and made teachers’ lives a whole lot harder. A report from Common Sense Media this fall showed that 70% of teenage students used artificial intelligence for school or fun. But a majority of those students’ parents and teachers were unaware. Leila Wheless, a seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher in North Carolina, asked her students how they use the technology.
Wed, November 06, 2024
AI’s appetite for electric power fuels interest in nuclear option
The thing about the artificial intelligence boom is that the tech needs a lot of electricity. One estimate from Goldman Sachs suggests that largely because of AI, data centers will use 160% more electricity by 2030. It’s got Big Tech fired up about an option that’s never really been the cool kid of the clean energy class: nuclear power. Microsoft made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant, while Google and Amazon are investing in new types of reactors. It’s stirring something of a “nuclear revival” for the U.S. after decades of stagnation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anna Erickson, professor of nuclear and radiological engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, about the push to revive the nuclear energy sector.
Tue, November 05, 2024
Misinformation to guard against on Election Day
It’s Election Day and even though the campaign may be over, the battle over misinformation is not. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Derek Tisler, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, about some of the misleading online narratives voters should expect to see and how to deal with them. This conversation is part of “Marketplace Tech’s” limited series “Decoding Democracy.” Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel .
Mon, November 04, 2024
Internet freedom takes a hit during global elections, report finds
In case you forgot, we’ve got Election Day tomorrow. But it was also a big year for elections in the rest of the world. About half of the global population is voting in national elections in 2024, and in many countries people have encountered shut down internet, blocked websites or manipulated content online, according to a recent report from the nonprofit Freedom House. Allie Funk leads Freedom House’s technology and democracy initiative, and she told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino this is the 14th consecutive year the report has documented a decline in human rights online.
Fri, November 01, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — Apple Intelligence arrives, AI writes Google’s code, and AI medical transcription tool hallucinates
An AI transcription tool used in health care has been found to frequently hallucinate things no one ever said, including making up medications. That’s just one of the topics for today’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Plus, we’ll get into what we learned from this week’s Big Tech earnings, including Google saying that it’s using AI to generate about 25% of its code. But first, it’s been a busy week for Apple. The company launched some of its new Apple Intelligence features and released its new lineup of Mac computers along with some souped-up chips. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, to get her take on this week’s tech news.
Thu, October 31, 2024
Why AI is Hollywood’s favorite monster
For almost a century, people have been going to the movies to get freaked out by fictional depictions of artificial intelligence. Back in 1968, there was Hal 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The 1980s gave us Skynet in “The Terminator.” And these days, movies about rogue bots are more popular than ever. Films like 2022’s “M3GAN” and this summer’s “AfrAId” seem to be channeling our worst fears about the intelligent technology increasingly embedded in our daily lives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Shira Ovide, a tech reporter and author of The Washington Post’s “Tech Friend” newsletter, about why AI is such a compelling horror villain.
Wed, October 30, 2024
AI labels on digital political ads might backfire on candidates, research shows
We are in the midst of the first major U.S. election of the generative AI era. The people who want to win your vote have easy access to tools that can create images, video or audio of real people doing or saying things they never did — and slap on weird appendages or other make-believe effects along with targeted slogans. But the potential to deceive has led about two dozen states to enact some form of regulation requiring political ads that use artificial intelligence to include a label. So how do voters respond when they know a campaign has used AI? That’s what Scott Brennen and his team at New York University’s Center on Technology Policy set out to answer in a recent study.
Tue, October 29, 2024
Illicit, sexually explicit deepfakes are becoming a problem in schools
We know from various studies that young people are, unsurprisingly, using generative AI tools like chatbots and image generators, sometimes for homework, sometimes for fun and sometimes for malicious purposes. A recent survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that artificial intelligence is being used among high school students to create nonconsensual, illicit imagery — in other words, sexually explicit deepfakes. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Elizabeth Laird, director of equity in civic technology at CDT, to learn more.
Mon, October 28, 2024
Voice-over artists allege an AI company cloned their voices in lawsuit
With tech now able to clone voices in minutes, many people in creative industries are worried about what this could mean for their livelihoods. The BBC’s Ben Derico looks at what this AI revolution has meant for voice actors who claim to have had their likeness copied by an AI voice-generating company.
Fri, October 25, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — A fraying tech “bromance,” Claude’s new skills and a robotics boom
The next big thing in Silicon Valley might just be an old-fashioned concept: humanoid robots that can mimic our physical abilities. Developments in AI are triggering renewed interest in the robotics industry. And Anthropic’s latest Claude model can control a computer on its own, which could have implications for the future of work. But first, is the “best bromance in tech” starting to sour? That’s how OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once described his company’s partnership with Microsoft, but recently the alliance has shown signs of tension. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas for her take on all this for our weekly segment “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”
Thu, October 24, 2024
Apple answers the call for iPhone repairability
There’s a movement to make it possible to repair our gadgets ourselves instead of having to send them back to the company that makes them or, you know, just get a new one. The “right to repair” movement in consumer electronics has made real gains in recent years. Several states, like California, New York and Oregon, have passed legislation requiring it. And it looks like Apple’s newest iPhone — the 16 — has made strides in that department. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Kyle Wiens, CEO of the online repair guide iFixit, about the iPhone 16’s improved repairability.
Wed, October 23, 2024
On Instagram, politics is the new taboo
A content creator who goes by the username Mrs. Frazzled recently noticed something strange happening on her Instagram account. With more than 370,000 followers, her videos sometimes score millions of views. Except, it seems, when she talks about the election. Mrs. Frazzled sensed she was being shadowbanned by Instagram, so Geoffrey Fowler, a tech columnist at The Washington Post, investigated. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Fowler about what he found.
Tue, October 22, 2024
How tech is boosting the turnout of disabled voters
Trying to vote when your disabled can present a series of obstacles but technology can help, even if integrating technology into our election system has its risks. Back in 2020, several states changed their voting rules with more mail-in, early, and remote voting options which increased turnout among disabled voters. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams recently spoke with Michelle Bishop, voter access and engagement manager at the National Disability Rights Network, about finding the right balance of tech integration into our elections in order to empower more disabled voters in the U.S.
Mon, October 21, 2024
How Big Tech is courting Big Oil
Artificial intelligence, according to its boosters, could help us unlock solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems, like climate change. But in the meantime, it’s become a key tool for fossil fuel companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron to maximize the extraction of emissions-producing oil and gas. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to freelance reporter Karen Hao, who recently wrote in The Atlantic about how Microsoft has actively courted the fossil fuel industry.
Fri, October 18, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — SpaceX vs. California, and AI crawlers and VC dollars
Web crawlers scan and catalog sites all over the internet and, in the AI era, use that data to train chatbots. We’ll talk about why The New York Times is trying to put a stop to crawlers from the AI company Perplexity. We’ll also discuss the record share of venture capital dollars flowing into the AI sector and the difficulty of attracting investment for startups without those two magic letters. Plus, the ups and downs of SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, for her take on all this for our weekly segment “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”
Thu, October 17, 2024
Why presidential candidates are embracing podcast interviews
Vice President Kamala Harris sat for her first interview on Fox News Wednesday as the Democratic presidential candidate continued her media blitz ahead of the November election. And while it’s generating plenty of headlines, these kinds of big interviews just don’t hold the power they used to, according to Nick Quah, a podcast and culture critic at New York Magazine who’s been following the candidates’ interviews on the alternative media circuit. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Quah about how Kamala Harris’ appearance on more internet-native shows like the podcast “Call Her Daddy” or Donald Trump’s appearances on various “bro-centric” shows like Logan Paul ‘sYouTube channel represent a notable media shift compared to previous elections.
Wed, October 16, 2024
After years of missed deadlines, Tesla enters the robotaxi race
After years of hype, Tesla finally debuted a robotaxi called the Cybercab last week. CEO Elon Musk has been making and breaking promises about Tesla’s autonomous vehicle for years. So, did the debut of the Cybercab finally deliver? Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor for The Verge, tells Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino what the Cybercab unveiling means for Musk and for Tesla.
Tue, October 15, 2024
A deluge of online misinformation obscures FEMA disaster relief efforts
Online misinformation about Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and about the relief response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency have surged in recent weeks, including false narratives of aid being withheld from victims for their political beliefs and aid being stolen by undocumented immigrants. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Ethan Porter, professor of media, public affairs and political science at George Washington University, about why there’s been so much misinformation about these natural disasters and FEMA’s relief response.
Mon, October 14, 2024
TikTok creators don’t want a ban
TikTok has a lot going on legally these days. Last week, it saw a fresh round of lawsuits alleging the short-form video app harms children. And then there’s the federal law that could ban the app if ByteDance, its China-based owner, doesn’t divest by January. TikTok has sued to block that law. Oral arguments in TikTok Inc. v. Merrick Garland were heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in September. The company is joined by eight TikTok creators as plaintiffs in the case, and one of them is Talia Cadet. She has nearly 140,000 followers on TikTok, where she produces lifestyle videos focused on her love of books and travel. She talked with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino about the case.
Fri, October 11, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — Breaking up Google, TikTok troubles and the “Godfather of AI” gets a Nobel Prize
TikTok is facing yet another legal challenge. This week, attorneys general from 13 states plus Washington, D.C., sued the short-form video app, alleging that it harms children. We’ll be digging into the latest lawsuits on today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” our roundup of the week’s top tech headlines. Like the so-called Godfather of AI who is sharing the Nobel Prize in physics. Plus, the U.S. government is weighing what to do about Google after its search business was ruled a monopoly earlier this year. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories.
Thu, October 10, 2024
Some of the walls around Meta’s Threads app are coming down
The new kid on the block of social media, Meta’s Threads, hit 200 million active users in August. When it launched in the summer of 2023 as a rival to the platform formerly known as Twitter, Meta said the app would eventually be integrated into the so-called fediverse. This “federated universe” is the most prominent example of a decentralized social network in which users can join any affiliated platform and interact with content from all the others. Recently, Meta took some steps to integrate Threads into this ecosystem, and Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer for The Washington Post, has been following the developments.
Wed, October 09, 2024
Do paid data-removal services pay off?
A lot of personal data – stuff like your home address, phone number, marital status and more – is out there on the internet. Anyone can buy it from sites like Whitepages, PeopleFinders or Intelius, which aggregate data from public records and social media. You can contact each of these “people search” sites and request they take down your information, but it’s a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. Naturally, a whole industry of data-removal services has sprung up. For a price, they promise to do the dirty work for you. But do they deliver? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Yael Grauer, a researcher at Consumer Reports, who recently looked into the efficacy of the data-removal industry.
Tue, October 08, 2024
A “village” of hackers is beefing up election security
Until about a decade ago, independent cybersecurity researchers in the U.S. weren’t allowed to examine voting machines for potential vulnerabilities. But that ban was essentially lifted in 2015. Two years later, DEF CON — one of the largest hacker conventions — decided to invite hackers, cybersecurity researchers and election officials to find those flaws during its annual Voting Village event. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Catherine Terranova, executive director of Voting Village, about how they balance the well-intentioned work of finding vulnerabilities before bad actors do and the problem of misinformation around the security of voting machines.
Mon, October 07, 2024
The quest to discover the creator of bitcoin
It’s been more than 15 years since the digital currency bitcoin was launched, going from a fringe phenomenon in the dark corners of the internet to an asset traded on Wall Street. But the identity of bitcoin’s creator, known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained a mystery wrapped in a cryptographic enigma. Now, investigative filmmaker Cullen Hoback may have cracked the case. His last HBO series “Into the Storm” uncovered the origins of the QAnon conspiracy theory. In his new documentary, “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” Hoback sets out to answer the elusive question: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? To prevent any spoilers, we’ll keep his conclusions secret.
Fri, October 04, 2024
Bytes: Week in Review — OpenAI’s valuation doubles, biotech investment grows and a prescription giant is acquired
Investors are once again pouring money into biotechnology startups. But this time, it feels different from the heyday of 2021. We’ll be digging into the latest data for today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” our roundup of the week’s top headlines, including some you might have missed. We’ll also talk about a private equity deal with the country’s biggest digital pharmacy platform. But first, OpenAI closes a historic funding round. The maker of ChatGPT raised another $6.6 billion — valuing the company at $157 billion, double its worth earlier this year. Our regular contributor Christina Farr, managing director with Manatt Health, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss the news.
Thu, October 03, 2024
The AI-crypto power struggle
All those fancy artificial intelligence systems need a lot of data centers to run, and those data centers need a lot of energy. One estimate from the Electric Power Research Institute suggests that current data center electricity consumption in the U.S. will more than double by 2030 , making up about 9% of all energy use. But the AI sector is coming up against the big energy-hungry tech innovation of yesteryear: crypto mining. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Reuters reporter Laila Kearney about the scramble to power up in both industries.

Marketplace Tech

Meta's news blackout in Canada causes problems during election

A battery farm in the Bronx could help clean up New York's power grid

AI can't read the room

Bytes: Week in Review - OpenAI's for-profit troubles, FTC sues Uber and how VCs are weathering Trump tariffs

Is community fact-checking the future of social media moderation?

Cities take the lead in battling rent-setting algorithms

This company uses AI to make workers AI-savvy — and keep their jobs

Mobile apps are failing users with disabilities

Bytes: Week in Review — Meta's antitrust trial, Nvidia's export restraint, and Jack Dorsey's hot take on IP law

For the 2034 Olympics, Utah wants air taxis instead of Ubers

Can the U.S. get around China's restrictions on rare earth minerals?

Virginia's reliance on surveillance tech raises data privacy questions

Is using AI in job interviews cheating?

Bytes: Week in Review — How tariffs impact consumer gadgets, e-commerce and the AI boom

Etsy's AI curates the search for the perfect thing

What does a bear market mean for Big Tech?

Microsoft wants to be the world's AI platform

How to ethically design a nuclear power plant

Bytes: Week in Review — TikTok’s new bidders, Tesla sales slump and OpenAI raises $40 billion

Why LGBTQ+ teens, young adults feel safer online

Worry over worker visas goes viral in Silicon Valley

Napster lives on

China sets its sights on AI leadership

Bytes: Week in Review — Trump officials’ Signal leak, 23andMe goes bankrupt and chatbots take on search engines

Network effect: Customers help utilities build smarter, more efficient power grid

The SEC invites cryptocurrency supporters and skeptics to the table

AI chatbots mimic human anxiety, study finds

Workers hope to steer giant Southern EV battery plant toward unionization

Bytes: Week in Review — Nvidia’s new bot, evaluating AI models in health care, and a health tech company preps its IPO

More Stanford grads are finding jobs and purpose in defense tech

Ransomware’s new strategy: naming and shaming victims

The do’s and don’ts of payment apps

Schools are using AI tracking software on student devices, recent investigation shows

Bytes: Week in Review – AI that reads emotions, Waymo expands its services, and the industry pushes back on federal tech cuts

Futurist couldn’t predict our inability to plan for the future

The pandemic made teachers learn to love tech

Keeping remote workers close to the action

How the pandemic gave a huge boost to wastewater virus tracking

Bytes: Week in Review – Tariff tensions hit tech stocks, TSMC expands its U.S. investment and a tech leader joins bid to buy TikTok

Maryland’s message to Big Tech: Think different.

Can close connections with AI chatbots harm kids?

Parents want their kids to be social, but with less social media

Youngsters’ social media habit has developmental impact, researcher says

Bytes: Week in Review — Apple’s huge investment, Nvidia’s strong earnings and Bybit hack batters bitcoin

As followership wanes, TikTok resets relations between creators and fans

If AI writes code, is coding still crucial for kids to learn?

How will Australia’s teen social media ban work?

Satellites provide internet access and a lot more, but the skies are getting crowded

Bytes: Week in Review — deep cuts at AI agency, DOGE sued again and pulling the plug on the Ai Pin

Responsible ways to use AI for government efficiency

The cost of losing government webpages and public data

When venture capital collides with the nation’s capital

Are we ready for ‘grief-tech’?

Bytes: Week in Review — AI talks at Paris summit, Apple launches health study and BuzzFeed’s social media plans

Will DeepSeek disrupt American AI’s first-mover advantage?

The AI boom is carving space for the data centers economy

AI pressures professions to accept artificial expertise

The complicated business of changing digital map names and boundaries

Bytes: Week in Review — Google’s AI policy pivot, OpenAI teams up with California colleges, and robotaxis arrive in Austin

The case for a comprehensive federal law to oversee AI

A veteran of Reagan’s “Star Wars” has doubts about Trump’s “Iron Dome”

Artificial ingredient: Cooking up new snacks with aid of AI

Reimagining the long-term alignment of human and AI advancements

Bytes: Week in Review — DeepSeek, chip tariffs, and an attempt to get kids off social media

Trump renews interest in crypto “meme coins”

How Trump’s executive order on online free speech could upend content moderation

“Superagency” explores how AI can enhance human potential to new heights

At Davos, rich and powerful now comfortable with power of AI

Bytes: Week in Review — The Stargate project, Trump meme coins, and the TikTok flip-flop

As LA blazes rage, even firefighters turn to Watch Duty

How one college is leveraging AI for educators and students

Trump’s election syncs up with tech backlash against gloom and guilt

Biden pushed back on Big Tech’s power, and Trump found a few new friends

Bytes: Week in Review — TikTok shutdown, Biden’s AI policies and Zuckerberg asks Trump for a favor

California’s wildfire detection tech was no match for the Palisades fire

Donors need protection too as wildfire misinformation and scams emerge

How AI chatbots are turning the tables on scammers

Will AI replace call center workers?

Bytes: Week in Review — Meta’s users take over fact checks, YouTubers sue PayPal and highlights from CES