Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

Last month, a band called The Velvet Sundown surged in popularity on Spotify with its 70s inflected rock. Yeah, it was all generated by AI. Synthetic music is getting better and better, leaving a lot of human artists concerned that their original work could be used to feed the machines that might take their jobs. Now some researchers are fighting back with a tool called “MusicShield.”

Wearables aren't just for tracking steps or monitoring heart rates anymore. In AI-crazed Silicon Valley, a new crop of tech-enabled accessories has taken hold… and they could be listening to everything we say.

Marketplace’s Jennifer Pak recently attended the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. She asked Chinese AI firms what they think about the humans who might lose jobs to their AI products.

Esports is a multi-billion dollar industry, with players making millions by getting good at video games. But while traditional athletes, usually, retire into coaching, managing or being a pundit, what does an esports player do when they’ve hung up their controller? The BBC’s Will Chalk files this report from the U.K.

On today’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review, Perplexity AI has offered $34.5 billion to buy Alphabet's Chrome browser, despite the fact the tech giant hasn't said it's for sale. Plus, the reviews are in for OpenAI's highly anticipated GPT-5 model and they're kinda…mixed. But first, President Trump gave chipmakers Nvidia and AMD the green light to sell their less powerful semiconductors in China, in exchange for a 15% cut of sales revenue. The deal is already raising eyebrows and legal questions.

China’s labor market is known for being intense, especially in the tech sector. For years high profile tech workers have embraced the “996” schedule – that's 9am to 9pm six days a week.And recently, Silicon Valley startups have reportedly been leaning in to the “996” grind themselves. So now China is taking it up a notch.

Implementing AI in government agencies — where the public goes for things like food stamps and unemployment or disability benefits — could come with tradeoffs, according to a recent report by the Roosevelt Institute. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino sat down with Samantha Shorey, who authored that report on AI and public administration.

In recent years, the Transportation Security Administration has been piloting facial recognition at security checkpoints. But opting out of getting scanned can be complicated, according to a recent report from the non-profit Algorithmic Justice League. Joy Buolamwini is president of the organization and co-authored that report.

U.S.-based data centers are expanding at a fast pace, thanks largely to the boom in generative artificial intelligence software and cloud computing. But they’re also reportedly causing environmental issues and other problems for their neighbors. The BBC’s Michelle Fleury reports from Georgia on how the boom in data centers is raising environmental and sustainability concerns from the people who live near them.

OpenAI’s new open-weight models are designed to run on a local computer and can be fine tuned by users. A Tech Transparency Project report shows Google dropped more than 50 DEI-related groups from its funding list. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the company’s investment to build up its supply chain in the domestically. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, to discuss all of this and more.

Section 1033 of the Dodd Frank Act was finalized at the end of the Biden administration and would require banks to give consumers free access and control of their personal banking data.The rule had met legal pushback from the bank industry and the CFPB under the Trump administration planned to scrap it. But last week, the bureau said it will instead rewrite Section 1033.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino discusses the news with Rohit Chopra, who served as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when the rule was finalized in 2024.

Marketplace’s Alice Wilder has been waiting for a love letter from her boyfriend to arrive at her home since March. But it’s not just her — years of financial troubles and political turmoil mean that those still sending letters are experiencing longer delivery times. Today, Wilder explores how email has eaten into USPS’ letter traffic since 2008 and whether a romantic email could ever replace the intimacy of a handwritten letter.

A new national study from groups including Gallup and the non-profit Jobs for the Future found that relatively few employees have any influence over how new technology is adopted in the workplace. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Molly Blankenship, director of strategy and impact at Jobs for the Future, about what that means for employers and employees as technology like generative AI becomes more common in the office.

As autonomous vehicles become more common, cities are grappling with how to keep robotaxis from interfering with emergency response efforts. Julia Pickar reports on how Seattle is trying to fix this problem.

The Tea app is a place for women to share red or green flags about men, but it recently suffered a major data breach. Plus, why some members of Congress are protesting a deal with China to allow Nvidia to sell its H20 chips to the country. And YouTube is rolling out new age estimation technology to protect younger users. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to discuss all this.

Simon Johnson, Nobel-winning economist, joined Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to explain his current thinking about AI and inequality. He says the tech could bring productivity gains, but they might not benefit everyone.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks to Sayash Kapoor, a PhD candidate at Princeton and co-author of “AI Snake Oil." He says small tweaks to AI chatbots can often have big, unpredictable effects.

In Canada, road freight is part of the backbone of the economy — historically moving about four-fifths of all goods across the country, with demand growing. But trucking is changing, with digital freight-matching platforms reshaping how drivers find work and how goods get delivered. The BBC’s Sam Gruet reports.

Temperatures this summer have been hotter than usual, a trend we have come to expect with climate change as records are continually surpassed. While many of us can ride out extreme heat in the comfort of air conditioned interior spaces, outdoor workers don’t have that option and must contend with the risks of serious injury which can be acute and long lasting. A fast growing market for wearable cooling products, both in high tech and low tech varieties, is attempting to meet the challenge. Among those products is the CülCan, made by the Tennessee based small business Black Ice.  “If you can pull heat away from your hand, it'll cool your whole body down. And so that's what we've done with the CülCan. It's basically a five inch cylinder that contains our special coolant,” said Mike Beavers, co-founder of Black Ice. A key selling point of the product, according to Beavers, is that the coolant inside, which is a chemical composition Beavers designed, doesn’t get as cold as ice, so it is easier to use on a person’

NASA employees protest budget cuts, Google reportedly eyes licensing deals with 20 national news organizations, and President Donald Trump signed three executive orders on AI this week. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams is joined by Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at venture firm Collab Capital, to break down these stories.