Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

The Labor Department this week confirmed what a lot of Americans have been feeling: Inflation is kind of sticking around, and higher interest rates are likely to as well. We’ll look at what that means for venture capital, which was already slow to flow. Plus, the Joe Biden administration announced a $6.6 billion deal with Taiwan-based semiconductor maker TSMC to build a third production hub in Arizona. We take a look at the ongoing rollout of the CHIPS and Science Act, which makes it all possible. But first, Tesla has settled a lawsuit in the death of a software engineer who was killed driving a Tesla while using the company’s semiautonomous driving software, Autopilot. The suit put scrutiny on Elon Musk’s claims about the software. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali is joined by Jewel Burks Solomon, managing director at Collab Capital, for her take on these stories.

More than 99% of all species that have lived on Earth are now extinct — something humans have certainly had a hand in. There’s now an entire scientific discipline devoted to bringing some of these species back. If you’re picturing those cloning scenes from “Jurassic Park” right now, we get it. But “de-extinction” is not quite that. Beth Shapiro is the chief science officer at Colossal Biosciences, a bioengineering startup working on de-extinction. She explained to Marketplace’s Lily Jamali how the process works.

AI models are increasingly being used by the fashion industry, as they save time and money. Some models and agencies are fans, but others want to see more protection for the image rights of models. What does it all mean for the fashion industry? The BBC’s Sam Gruet reports.

We hear words like “safety” and “transparency” thrown around in the artificial intelligence industry, but they don’t always mean the same things to a tech insider that they do to the rest of us. Luckily, tech journalist Karen Hao wrote a helpful glossary of 50 AI ethics terms to help us make sense of what tech leaders really mean by the words they use. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with her about some of the double meanings on her list.

It’s been six months of war in the Gaza Strip since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The destruction and death have been profound, and nearly every aspect of life in the roughly 140-square-mile territory has been upended. The New York Times recently reported that the Israeli military is using facial recognition artificial intelligence to monitor Palestinians in Gaza. The government hasn’t publicly acknowledged it, but reporter Sheera Frenkel spoke to Israeli intelligence officers, military officials and soldiers who confirmed that the technology was being used for mass surveillance. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Frenkel about facial recognition’s role in the conflict, starting with the story of a Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Toha, who reportedly was arrested and beaten by Israeli forces.

Google has agreed to destroy billions of browser data records to settle a class action suit alleging that the tech giant misled users about how Chrome tracked them in “Incognito mode.” Plus, “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart reveals that Apple discouraged him from interviewing Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan on his Apple TV+ podcast, “The Problem with Jon Stewart.” It’s a window into the “creative differences” that led to the abrupt end of the show last fall and the pressure creators face as Big Tech companies move deeper into “content.” But first, a federal internet subsidy for low-income households is about to expire. We’ll look at efforts to keep that program funded as the Federal Communications Commission moves to vote on restoring net neutrality rules. That policy, enacted during the Barack Obama administration and rescinded under former President Donald Trump, blocked internet service providers from favoring certain websites ov

Fake obituaries have become an online trend. They exploit tragedy for profit and have raised concerns about the reliability of search engines. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali discussed the problem with reporter Mia Sato of The Verge. Her investigation uncovered a network of websites generating this content using search engine optimization, or SEO, tactics. Sato also covered the story of Brian Vastag, a journalist who experienced this abuse when he read his own fake obituary along with that of his ex-wife, who did actually pass away.

The Chinese company ByteDance owns two versions of basically the same app. In the U.S. we have TikTok, used by an estimated 170 million people, while in China they have Douyin, home to more than 700 million active users. Despite having the same parent company, TikTok and Douyin function as separate worlds. Now, as TikTok simmers in political hot water, the differences between the two apps are under a microscope. To get to the bottom of what sets these sister apps apart, Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Marketplace’s China correspondent, Jennifer Pak, about why ByteDance has this system in the first place.

It was an early attempt to use artificial intelligence in the 2024 presidential election: Ahead of January’s New Hampshire primary, a deepfake audio recording of President Joe Biden made it to some voters in the form of a robocall, encouraging them to save their vote. A political consultant named Steve Kramer said he orchestrated that call to show the dangers of deepfakes. Nevertheless, it caused real confusion. And there are a lot of deepfakes out there, including videos, that contend they are educational or parodies. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali and Kimberly Adams discuss video deepfakes and whether the intent behind them outweighs their overall impact.

Right now, the federal government is piloting its response to Silicon Valley’s AI boom. It’s called the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, and it’s supposed to “democratize” access to AI by making gigantic and expensive AI models available to academic researchers. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, who is skeptical of the initiative’s goals. As Myers West explains, the issue with the NAIRR is the government can’t launch an AI program of its own without partnerships that are potentially lucrative for Big Tech.

In this week’s episode of Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review, Lily Jamali chats with Joanna Stern, The Wall Street Journal’s senior personal tech columnist, who takes us on a road trip through New Jersey’s network of Tesla superchargers. Stern recently explored how drivers of non-Tesla electric vehicles can now use these stations via an adapter. It’s part of her larger look into the best ways to save money supercharging your EV. Also this week, we’ll get Stern’s take on what to expect at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, which will kick off June 10 in Cupertino, California. But first, a look at a new law in Florida, the latest legislative attempt to address the potential harms social media can inflict on children. It prohibits kids 13 and under from creating accounts on popular platforms.  

It’s something government officials on both sides of the aisle are known to do: pressuring tech platforms to bend to their will, aka jawboning. But the line between persuasion and coercion, or even censorship, can get murky. Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments from two states alleging that the Joe Biden administration illegally coerced social media companies into blocking conservative content. Matt Perault, now with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center on Technology Policy, says that in his former job working in policy at Facebook, jawboning happened all the time.

When you look at the lawsuits aimed at blocking attempts to regulate tech, it’s usually not companies like Meta or Snap doing the suing. Oftentimes, it’s a group called NetChoice, which has emerged as Big Tech’s top lobbying force from Capitol Hill to the courts. Today, a conversation with NetChoice General Counsel Carl Szabo and Megan Iorio, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit focused on privacy. They occasionally agree, but very often they do not. Case in point: the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which requires websites that children are likely to visit to provide privacy protections by default. It was set to take effect in July, but so far, Szabo’s group has successfully blocked it in court. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali sat down with Szabo and Iorio and asked about how their groups interact.

The number of gamers in Africa has doubled in recent years, but many gaming platforms require users to pay for subscriptions or make in-game purchases. That’s a problem for users who don’t have credit cards, but as the BBC’s Mo Allie reports, some fintech companies think they have a solution.  

Crypto is once again big in the Philippines. It first took off during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2021 with a now-defunct video game called Axie Infinity, where players earned money — often more than minimum wage — through non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Of course, the crypto winter soon followed with the implosion of FTX in 2022, but now crypto is back in a big way on the island nation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with reporter Eli Tan, who recently visited and wrote about the scene for The New York Times.

When a company pushes false claims about using artificial intelligence in its  business, that’s known informally as “AI washing.” It can feel like everybody’s doing it, but the Securities and Exchange Commission is cracking down on the practice. Plus, is the government’s communication with social media companies persuasion or coercion? The Supreme Court heard arguments this week in yet another case involving online speech. But first, the Department of Justice on Thursday announced that it’s bringing antitrust charges against Apple. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Reuters Breakingviews columnist Anita Ramaswamy about all of these stories for this week’s episode of Marketplace Tech’s Bytes: Week in Review.

Imagine that you could walk into one of the world’s great libraries and leave with whatever you wanted — any book, map, photo or historical document — forever. No questions asked. There is an argument that something like that is happening to the digital data of nations. In a lot of places, anyone can come along and scrape the internet for the valuable data that’s the backbone of artificial intelligence. But what if raw data generated in a particular country could be used to benefit not outside interests, but that country and its people? Some nations have started building their own AI infrastructure to that end in a bid to secure their “AI sovereignty.” According to venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, the potential implications and opportunities are huge.

Marketplace’s Lily Jamali and Kimberly Adams discuss how deepfake images are leading people to second guess everything in the latest episode of our “Decoding Democracy” series.

More than two years after Reddit first announced plans to go public, a share offering is expected to hit the stock market this week. The social network boasts 260 million active weekly users and more than 100,000 active communities, according to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Yet in its nearly two-decade history, Reddit has never turned a profit. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Elizabeth Lopatto, senior writer at The Verge, who says not everyone is on board with the company selling stock.

Roasting coffee beans was a market worth over $1 billion globally in 2022, according to Grand View Research, which projects that figure could double by 2030. Traditional roasters, powered by the fossil fuel natural gas, still dominate the market. These machines are big and bulky and kind of look like part of a train. But the makers of more compact electric roasters are piling into the business. And they have an edge, touting themselves as high-tech alternatives that are more environmentally friendly and cheaper to run than their old-school counterparts. The BBC’s Frey Lindsay has more on the story.