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.
Episodes
When it comes to homebuilding, Ronda Conger, vice president of CBH Homes, wants to be like the Savannah Bananas.
“We are out there trying to do things so differently,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons we embraced AI so quickly.”
But there are growing fears that artificial intelligence will begin to replace human employees. For Conger’s team, the bots are doing the grunt work, so the real humans can shine.
2025 brought some new speed bumps for electric vehicle sales, namely the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It cut federal EV tax credits — up to $7,500 for new cars and $4,000 for used ones. Those incentives had been on the books in some form since 2008 and were expanded during the Biden administration. They expired at the end of September.
Consumers rushed to take advantage before they disappeared, leading to...
AI psychosis became a thing in 2025. That's when a chatbot leads a user into a delusional spiral.
The technology's tendency to affirm what people say can result in conversations that become untethered from reality and, in the worst cases, has ended with real-world harms. Kashmir Hill has been reporting on this phenomenon for The New York Times.
Content warning: This episode includes mention of self harm and suicide...
This year turned out to be a pretty big year for autonomous vehicles. Waymo is the leader in the robotaxi race and over the last year, its signature Jaguar electric vehicles have become a common sight on the streets and recently freeways of cities around the country.
Companies like Uber and Zooks have expanded their fleets to several metropolitan areas. And Tesla finally rolled out its cybercab service in a limited cap...
About half of U.S. states now require some form of online age verification to prevent kids from accessing certain content — usually pornography. But in some cases, that also means broader categories of adult content that include social media. Drew Harwell, tech reporter at The Washington Post, has been following this.
Will Gottsegen, a staff writer at The Atlantic, tests out Meta’s AI smart glasses and gives us a recap of how AI continues to get embedded in consumer tech.
Polystyrene is the chemical compound that makes up styrofoam, which is used for packaging and insulation. But it’s not the most environmentally friendly.
By one estimate, 40 million tons of polystyrene were produced globally in 2024, leaving millions of tons of plastic waste. The search for an earth-friendly alternative has led researchers to dig deep and come up with an unlikely solution: fungus. The BBC’s Anna Hollig...
In January, we saw a who's who of tech leaders front and center at President Donald Trump's inauguration.
Since, the White House has advocated for the build out of AI infrastructure and put a moratorium on state-level AI regulation. But the Trump administration also added a $100,000 fee to petitions for H-1B visas, which are widely used in the tech sector.
To review the year in tech and Trump we called up Suyash P...
Could AI chat bots replace human doctors? Probably not, but that won’t stop people from trying.
Just as they did during the emergence of Google, doctors across the country are grappling with the changing healthcare landscape thanks to artificial intelligence. Today on the show, Dr. Hassan Bencheqroun, a pulmonary and intensive care doctor in San Diego, California, talks about his approach to the intersection of patient...
Building artificial intelligence tools requires a lot of graphic processing units, and those GPUs need huge amounts of ultra-fast memory to feed them data. Micron Technology is one of a handful of memory chip makers that has been selling a whole lot of memory, thanks to the AI boom.
Plus, cloud company Oracle's data center debt is coming under scrutiny. And Merriam-Webster names the word of the year for 2025: slop.
Search engines, social media, e-commerce, and mobile games all make money by selling advertising. But making ads work in AI search might not be so straight forward. Perplexity, for instance, reportedly pulled back on plans to integrate ads into their AI search engine. And internal documents showed the company made only $20,000 in ad revenue in the fourth quarter last year.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke wit...
A career in tech was once seen as a safe bet — the jobs were plentiful, the pay was ample. But this year the tech sector had another “meh” year for hiring according to the job site Indeed. Tech jobs have been declining now for several years, but this year, the losses at least seemed to stabilize, according to Indeed's latest Jobs & Hiring Trends Report. Still, job postings in the industry remain well below their pre-p...
Tech giants are estimated to have spent almost $400 billion in capital expenditures this year, mostly to build data centers for artificial intelligence. A single massive facility can have a price tag in the billions of dollars.
And many states want in on that spending spree. Thirty-seven states have some sort of incentive program to attract data centers with the hope of bringing a boost to their local economies. They'r...
Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at NYU, explains the differences between large language models and "world models" — and why he thinks the latter are key to achieving artificial general intelligence.
There’s been something of a critical mass of high-profile departures and retirement announcements at Apple in recent weeks. Plus, how will consumers be helped or hurt by a potential merger between Netflix and Warner Bros or a hostile takeover from Paramount? And McDonald's pulls an AI-generated Christmas ad because some folks on social media weren't “lovin' it.”
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna St...
The AI boom is propelling a once-obscure group of state regulators into key decision-making roles for the economy. AI needs data centers, data centers need power and power is generally regulated in some way — depending on the state — by public utilities commissions.
That's the topic of a new report from the Center on Technology Policy at NYU. Scott Brennen, CTP director and author of the report, said these commissions ...
The extended Black Friday sale season means a lot of people have been buying new TVs. The top sets today can display in up to 8K Ultra High Definition, they have deeper blacks, brighter highlights and are thinner and lighter-weight than ever. And yet, modern TVs have their haters — a dedicated group of purists who find them lacking, and would rather hunt down a good old fashioned used plasma.
Prosthetic limbs can be expensive, costing thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. So the industry seemed ripe for disruption when 3D printing came along. The technology requires little labor and uses economical materials. But the reality of 3D printing prosthetic limbs isn’t that straightforward, according to writer and University of California, Berkeley, lecturer Britt Young, who uses a prosthetic arm.
Market...
A new report from Stanford and Common Sense Media finds that more than half of U.S. teens use AI chatbots for companionship. But, according to Dr. Darja Djordjevic, an adolescent and adult psychiatrist who co-authored the research, the bots aren't equipped to provide the kind of emotional support young people need when dealing with a mental health issue.
Dr. Djordjevic and her team simulated conversations involving var...
The Trump administration has been trying for months to ban AI regulations at the state level. And its latest gambit to roll such a measure into the congressional National Defense Authorization Act appears to have failed. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Tuesday that GOP leadership is now “looking at other places” to include that measure after reportedly facing pushback from both parties.
Plus, New York recently...
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