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
This week we learned the Japanese investment firm Softbank sold all of its stake in the juggernaut chipmaker Nvidia. We'll get into why on today's “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, Apple is reportedly pushing back the release of its thinnest iPhone, the Air, and Wikipedia is asking AI companies, once again, to pay for scraping its data.
But first, back to that big move by Softbank and its CEO, Masayoshi S...
Tech firms are racing to develop robot assistants that can take over our dreaded household chores. But teaching machines to perform these deceptively simple tasks is tedious. They need to observe the actions thousands, sometimes millions of times. And there's a cottage industry springing up to provide this training.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ayanna Howard, roboticist and dean of Ohio State Univers...
Combatting climate change will likely require a multi-pronged approach to renewable energy generation. After all, it's not sunny or windy everywhere all the time. Geothermal energy, which harnesses the natural heat generated by the earth, can significantly shrink the carbon footprint of heating and cooling buildings. Those systems are currently just a small part of the HVAC market. But the Department of Energy wants to acc...
Some AI companies are turning to nuclear power to meet demand for electricity. But traditional nuclear plants can take decades to bring online.
Now some tech companies are partnering with startups trying to build small, modular nuclear reactors, designed with speed in mind. One such company, Kairos, has a deal with Google to build a fleet of modular reactors. To do so, it’s relying on a technique first developed in th...
Extreme weather caused by climate change is affecting agriculture and raising the cost of foods like coffee, olive oil and chocolate. Cocoa prices have been hitting record highs due to extreme rainfall, drought and heat. And some experts say most of the land used for cocoa production won’t be usable in the future.
Marketplace’s Amy Scott, host of our podcast "How We Survive," explores a new way tech entrepreneurs are ...
On today's “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we discuss federal cybersecurity cutbacks that affected this week’s elections and a caucus of Midwestern states pushing to join the AI boom. Plus, Sens. Josh Hawley and Mark Warner introduced a bipartisan bill requiring some companies to report when AI replaces workers.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios tech policy reporter Maria Curi about these headlines an...
Big tech companies have invested hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure, including data centers that are popping up all over the country. Constructing the facilities brings in jobs to local communities, but what happens once the construction is finished? Former Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Pat Harker says tech companies owe a longer-lasting benefit to the communities that host data centers.
Marketplace tec...
Rya Jetha, tech culture reporter at The San Francisco Standard, spends a lot of time thinking about the industry’s internal dynamics. Gone are the computer programmers, self-proclaimed nerds of an era mostly focused on software development. Jetha says the new tech bro is of the “hard tech” era, with emphasis on the charisma needed to raise huge sums of money for expensive hardware innovations and AI technologies.
OpenAI’s latest AI video generator Sora 2 has gotten a lot of attention for its realistic creations. The tool is supposed to have guardrails to prevent creating videos based on misinformation.
But new analysis from watchdog group Newsguard found that, when prompted, Sora 2 often generated videos based on lies, such as false claims having to do with election fraud in a foreign country or that a toddler was detained by ...
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is serving 25 years in federal prison for fraud. His company collapsed and went bankrupt in 2022. Investigators found that billions of dollars in customer funds had been borrowed without permission to help shore up Bankman-Fried’s other firm, Alameda Research.
But throughout the last three years, Bankman-Fried has maintained his innocence, and h...
Several major firms announced tens of thousands of job layoffs this week, and some reports are putting the blame on AI. Plus, startup Character.AI says it will ban minors from interacting with its chatbots. Also, Nvidia became the first $5 trillion company. We'll look at what that means. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with regular contributor Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, about all these topics on this w...
Graphics processing units are essential to training and deploying artificial intelligence models, but they don’t come cheap. Big Tech companies like Meta, Microsoft and xAI have spent billions, amassing hundreds of thousands or even millions of them.
For those without such deep pockets, access to this kind of computing power has gotten out of reach. Recently, the state of California launched an initiative called CalCo...
Beijing is making it easier for global science and tech talent to visit or do business in China. Chinese officials opened a new K visa for graduates in science, technology, engineering and math to do research and start companies. This comes as the U.S. is cutting research grants and choking H-1B talent visas. Overseas, analysts say America’s loss could be China’s gain. But within China, there is a lot of anger over the K ...
In his new book, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales writes ”in the early years of the internet, we were right to be bullish about people and the technology. Our capacity for social connection, community and cooperation can deliver amazing things. But the very same human nature can deliver atrocities.”
Wales’s says he wrote this book to help combat a crisis of trust in society that is leading to the rise of authoritariani...
There are a lot of trending videos of people using face recognition tools to find cheating partners on dating apps. On TikTok, for example, videos have gone viral about people explaining how to use the tools like Cheater Buster, plus other staged videos of supposed partners catching their significant other on Tinder.
Joseph Cox, tech reporter at 404 Media, looked into the sudden rise of these services and the risks the...
OpenAI released its new web browser, Atlas, in a bid to become our main conduit to the internet. Plus, we learned this week that Amazon may be planning to expand its use of robots and shrink its use of humans at its warehouses. And this week's disruptive outage at Amazon Web Services reminded us of just how much we depend on cloud computing, even for a good night's sleep. Marketplace’s Nova Safo discussed all of this with ...
The promise has been titillating: quiet, electric taxis taking off vertically, floating over urban traffic. The consulting firm McKinsey says in a matter of five years, flying taxi fleets could rival airlines in size.
Well, maybe. It's already taking longer than predicted. Marketplace’s Henry Epp has been tracking the industry and its evolution.
Artificial intelligence holds a lot of promise for tribal nations — as a force multiplier for hard-to-staff departments, a tool to better serve tribal citizens, and even to aid in the revitalization of Indigenous languages and culture.
But, as with all applications of AI tools, data security concerns loom. And some nations are adopting the new technology quicker than others. For an overview, Marketplace’s Nova Safo spo...
AI chatbot adoption is moving rapidly. We can already ask the tools to help us find local restaurants, a good deal on an item we’re looking to purchase. And soon, we’ll even be able to buy products from Walmart through ChatGPT. But as more people turn to AI for search and shopping, what happens to small businesses that traditionally depend on web searches and online reviews?
California has enacted a law requiring rideshare giants Uber and Lyft to collectively bargain with their drivers. Because the drivers are technically independent contractors, they otherwise would not have federally-protected labor rights like full-time employees. The new state law could be a game changer.
Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Levi Sumagaysay, reporter at CalMatters, who helps sift through the details of t...
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