Marketplace Tech

In order to write her new book “I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI To Do ‘Almost’ Everything," journalist Joanna Stern decided to invite artificial intelligence into every aspect of her life — including her family life. She has a wife and two sons. On their spring break, she took them to Phoenix, where it's easy to hail a driverless car. They rode in a bunch of them, including one that totally freaked out.She brought home an AI-powered toy (which her four-year-old quickly tired of), and says she realized her kids will "gr...

Imagine if you invited robots - smart ones or “smart-ish,” at least - into every aspect of your life. Your emails and texts are all composed by an AI, the bots look at a photo of what’s in your fridge and figure out what you can make for dinner. They even become emotional support, providing advice and sometimes companionship. Journalist and founder of media company New Things, Joanna Stern, decided to try this and she wrote about it in her new book “I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI To Do Almost Everything.” Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke...

There's a new flex in Silicon Valley: how big is your AI agent swarm? They can work on your behalf, autonomously, 24/7, on whatever goal you give them. You might think having an army of AI minions could free up some time, maybe make work more chill. But, you’d be wrong, as Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino reports.

On this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we’ll discuss why Apple is paying a $250 million settlement over its Apple Intelligence tool and its capabilities. Plus, GameStop makes a surprising buyout offer for eBay. But first up: Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, announced a new computing deal this week with SpaceX and its AI division, xAI. Anthropic will get access to SpaceX’s Colossus One data center, which will let the company increase how much its customers can use Claude. The deal comes as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is facing off in federal court against OpenAI and...

Back in 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman got the idea to start a nonprofit AI lab to develop artificial general intelligence that benefits all humanity. The lab would also make its technology open source, calling it OpenAI.All that is according to a complaint filed by Elon Musk, who has since parted ways with the organization. And now he is suing OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman and its president Greg Brockman, saying they have abandoned the founding principles of the organization in pursuit of profits.They are currently facing off in federal court...

Technology has been transformative for how police officers do their jobs. Body cameras, speed detection technology and surveillance drones are some prominent examples. And now, law enforcement departments are trying to figure out if and how they want to add artificial intelligence to the mix. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Greg Barber, a science and technology journalist who recently wrote about this for Proof News. He explained how AI is being used in police work now and whether or not AI has become a time-saving tool for officers.

The startup Winnie is a marketplace for childcare. It works like this: Parents type in the age of their kid and their zip code, then different childcare providers in the area will pop up. You can also filter by languages spoken, and whether you want a childcare center or home-based daycare or another option. It's free for parents to use.But the company was founded back in 2016, when AI search wasn’t really a thing. And Winnie’s CEO and co-founder Sara Mauskopf says parents now want to be able to describe what they're looking for in n...

The GUARD Act is a bipartisan bill that would prohibit companies from letting kids under 18 interact with what the legislation calls "AI companions,” which are chatbots designed to encourage the simulation of an interpersonal relationship.This comes after some harrowing stories of teenagers who developed relationships with chatbots and then harmed themselves or others. The bill just passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talks about this with Ashley Gold, a senior tech policy reporter at Axios.

This week, Taylor Swift trademarked her voice and image in what appears to be a bid to protect against AI misuse. Plus, a Japanese airline is experimenting with humanoid robots to help with baggage.But first, Google landed a deal with the Pentagon to let its AI models be used for classified work. A Google spokesperson told us in a statement that the company is proud to be providing its services for national security and that it believes AI should not be used for “domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight."...

The war with Iran has upended supply chains including for materials that are critical to building the electronics we use everyday, such as a certain kind of thermoplastic, copper, and helium. We are now dealing with shortages of all of them. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jeff Janukowicz, an analyst with the research firm IDC, to learn more.

There's been renewed interest in nuclear power in recent years, thanks in part to demand from tech companies in search of reliable energy to power their AI data centers. The startup Kairos Power has jumped on this opportunity. Its nuclear reactors are cooled by molten salt. They also use golf-ball sized nuclear fuel, instead of uranium rods cooled by water used by traditional reactors. Mike Laufer, co-founder and CEO of Kairos, says their reactors a bit like an upside down gumball machine.The company just started construction on its first...

The International Math Olympiad is a yearly competition for students, most of them high school age, who compete to solve six difficult math problems. They're chosen from a pool of math problems submitted by different countries that participate in the competition. The problems that don't make the cut previously have mostly just been lost; there was no one place you could go to find them.But now a team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has gathered over 30,000 of those problems together in one dataset so both humans and AI mo...

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, allows government agencies to collect information about foreign nationals located abroad. That surveillance can happen without a warrant and the government can order email providers to turn over any messages of a particular foreigner, including those with a U.S. citizen.Section 702 is set to expire this week. President Donald Trump has called for its extension, but there are Congressional lawmakers in both parties who oppose the kind of surveillance the law allows for. Elizabeth Goitein at the Brennan Center for Justice has testified before Congress advocating...

This week, Meta is reportedly laying off 10% of its workers. But in the meantime, it's also capturing their mouse clicks to train its AI models. Plus, Roblox settles with states over child safety concerns. But first, Apple's CEO is stepping down. The company announced this week that CEO Tim Cook is moving on from that role after about 15 years. His successor is John Ternus, a senior vice president of hardware engineering at the company. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, a columnist at The Information, about all these headlines for this week’s “Tech Bytes...

Lawmakers around the U.S. are moving to restrict data center development. Maine, for example, recently passed what's being called the country's first statewide ban on data centers. The measure would prohibit building any new data centers until late 2027.As of this taping, Maine's governor, Janet Mills, was reportedly still undecided on whether she'd sign the bill. And 13 other states are also considering bans on data center development, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Tony Pipa of the Brookings Institution talks more about how much of the pushback has to do...

The social media company Snap recently announced it’s laying off about 1,000 workers — 16% of its employees. The company said these changes will reduce costs by more than half a billion dollars and help establish a path to net income profitability.This move comes after one of Snap's investors, Irenic Capital Management, wrote a public letter to the company outlining what it needs to do to “save” the company and cut costs.Snap has been a public company for nine years. It's had just a few non-consecutive profitable quarters. Sarah Kunst, a general partner at the v...

The Wayback Machine is a project of the Internet Archive. It sends out web crawlers to take snapshots of the internet, creating a digital library of web pages. But now, some news publications are blocking its crawlers over concerns that AI companies will access the Wayback Machine’s publicly available archive and then train their AI models with the content.Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talked about this with Andrew Deck at Harvard's Nieman Lab.

California became the first state to regulate embodied carbon in its building code. That’s changing the construction industry even beyond the state border. More than a third of planet-warming emissions come from buildings and construction. Marketplace’s The rest of it is what’s called embodied carbon. That’s the emissions that it took to make the steel, concrete, glass and insulation, and put them all together. Caleigh Wells looked into what California’s new regulations could mean for builders in this episode of Marketplace Tech, hosted by Stephanie Hughes.

This week, Spotify is letting its users buy physical books. Plus, Amazon acquires the satellite service provide Globalstar. But first, state lawmakers in Illinois are considering a bill that says developers of large AI models can’t be held liable for critical harms caused by those models, as long as the developer doesn't intentionally or recklessly cause the harm and has published a safety protocol on its website.A representative from OpenAI testified in favor of the bill; meanwhile, Wired reported this week that Anthropic is pushing for either major changes to the legislation, or for it...

The share of older workers is on the decline — about 37% of people age 55 and above are now active in the labor force. About a decade ago, it was around 40%.The pandemic chased some older workers out, and others can simply afford to retire. Another factor that's causing some to exit? The emergence of artificial intelligence. Learning how to interact with it as a tool, maybe even as a colleague, seems like a headache to some. So, they’re choosing retirement instead.Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Weber, who’s...