Marketplace Tech
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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.
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Can software companies survive the AI boom?
As artificial intelligence companies roll out more sophisticated agents, many analysts and investors raised concerns that AI could replace traditional...
Fewer students are enrolling in computer science classes and majors
According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the number of students enrolling in computer and information science decreased this p...
High-tech data centers get a powerful assist from a century-old company
Caterpillar, which manufactures heavy duty equipment like asphalt pavers, diesel engine locomotives, and industrial gas turbines, has been around for...
Crypto’s big growth on the books and in the shadows
Cryptocurrency is being used more frequently in illegal transactions — about $158 billion was used in illicit crypto activity last year. That’s an all...
Is the moon (and its resources) up for grabs?
NASA’s Artemis II mission, which will send humans around the moon for the first time in over five decades, could launch as early as March. This is par...
New study reveals a "smartphone penalty" that distorts survey results
According to surveys by the FINRA Foundation, our knowledge of personal finance here in the U.S. went down by 15% between 2009 and 2021. But what if i...
Is social media addictive? And are social media companies liable?
A landmark lawsuit that accuses social media companies of intentionally designing their platforms to be addictive — and causing harm to children and t...
Making the most of AI, without the hype
With all the fanfare surrounding AI these days — the utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares — it can be hard to see the technology as simply a tool t...
Bytes: Week in Review – Are we in an AI bubble?
Is AI a bubble? It's the trillion-dollar question in the economy. So Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino decided to look to history for some answers i...
A historic home tour of the virtual world
529 Bryant St. in Palo Alto, California, is home to a key landmark in tech history. Now owned and operated as a data center by Equinix, the building h...
The 'biohacking' trend that has tech workers experimenting on themselves
In an industry known for pushing the bounds of human innovation, tech elites are now trying to push the bounds of their own bodies. The hot new biohac...
AI is eating up the world's computing memory
Much like graphics processing units, high bandwidth memory is essential for training and running AI. It's paired with all those NVIDIA chips that have...
Trying to stay off your phone? There’s an app for that
The digital detox economy is estimated to grow to $20 billion by 2032. The gamification that got you addicted to your phone might be the key to puttin...
A whiplash year for electric vehicles
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 t...
How online age-gating laws went mainstream this year
About half of U.S. states now require some form of online age verification to prevent kids from accessing certain content — usually pornography. But i...
Why Big Tech leaders aligned themselves with White House politics this year
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 f...
Bytes: Week in Review - Micron's big earnings, Oracle's data center woes and "slop" is Merriam-Webster's word of the year
Building artificial intelligence tools requires a lot of graphic processing units, and those GPUs need huge amounts of ultra-fast memory to feed them...
A case for AI models that understand, not just predict, the way the world works
Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at NYU, explains the differences between large language models and "world models" — and why he thinks the latter are k...
Bytes: Week in Review - Apple's leadership departures raises concerns over its AI future
There’s been something of a critical mass of high-profile departures and retirement announcements at Apple in recent weeks. Plus, how will consumers b...
3D printing was supposed to disrupt prosthetic costs. It hasn’t.
Prosthetic limbs can be expensive, costing thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. So the industry seemed ripe for disruption when 3D printing...
Using AI chatbots for mental health support poses serious risks for teens, report finds
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. Dar...
Bytes: Week in Review - Amazon scales back AI anime dubs
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 co...
Have we given up on data privacy?
Every day, consumers are confronted with the fragility of our personal data privacy — another data breach, another government agency accessing databas...
What happens when all your coworkers are AI?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once speculated that we'll soon see the first billion-dollar company run by one person and an army of AI agents. Journalist Evan...
What it's like to be in a relationship where wearable AI records your conversations
Marketplace's Matt Levin visits a couple in suburban Sacramento who both use an AI-enabled pendant that acts as a personal assistant — and sometimes,...
Can digital apps help solve Africa’s unemployment crisis?
Sub-Saharan Africa has a youth unemployment problem. The latest figures from the International Labour Organisation show more than one in five young pe...
AI-enabled ed tech vendors fail to disclose capabilities and safeguards, report finds
Hannah Quay-de la Vallee, senior technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, coauthored a recent report that recommends more transparency...
The federal data and tools that "died" this year
In the Trump administration's efforts to shrink and realign the federal government, datasets on climate, health and demographics have disappeared. Som...
AI-generated "letters to the editor" are flooding academic publications
Dr. Carlos Chaccour, physician scientist at the University of Navarra, noticed something fishy about a letter to the editor the New England Journal of...
Bytes: Week in Review — Meta wins antitrust case
The holiday shopping season is here, and AI companies are pushing new chatbot retail partnerships. But, can these tools deliver on their promises to m...
This school trains the workforce behind China's automated factories
China recently came out with its latest five-year plan for growth, which will guide the world’s second largest economy through 2030. In it, top Commun...
For politicians, what makes a successful TikTok?
One thing almost everyone can agree on about Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York City: he's very good at vertical short-form video.
Love it...
Bridging the uncanny valley of lab-grown meat
About a third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from our food systems, and livestock production is a big part of that. Experts largely agree tha...
Chocolate's high tech and climate-friendly pivot
Extreme weather caused by climate change is affecting agriculture and raising the cost of foods like coffee, olive oil and chocolate. Cocoa prices hav...
Bytes: Week in Review - Quantifying AI's impact on job cuts
On today's “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we discuss federal cybersecurity cutbacks that affected this week’s elections and a caucus of Midwestern stat...
Former regional Fed president: We need an "AI land grant act"
Big tech companies have invested hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure, including data centers that are popping up all over the country. Construct...
Silicon Valley's tech bro culture is changing
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 com...
Sora 2's disinformation problem
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 preven...
Sam Bankman-Fried returns to court to challenge fraud verdict
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is serving 25 years in federal prison for fraud. His company collapsed and w...
Bytes: Week in Review - OpenAI officially joins the browser wars
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 plannin...