Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

President Donald Trump's visit to the Middle East has prompted a flurry of AI deals worth billions. We'll get into the details on today's “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”Stateside, the Trump administration has rolled back a Biden-era “AI Diffusion” rule. Companies involved in the semiconductor supply chain were critical of the rule, though it's still not entirely clear how Trump plans to revamp the regulation.Plus, what some might call the most obvious rebrand: Warner Bros brings back the "HBO" to its Max streaming platform.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, to discuss all of this and more.

President Donald Trump talks a lot about wanting to build more stuff here in the U.S. But the future of manufacturing might not even be on earth, but in orbit.It might sound kind of out there — or way out there — but space manufacturing is already happening on a small scale. There's a mini boom of companies looking to do more of it, according to recent reporting in Wired by journalist Jonathan O'Callaghan. He says space has some unique qualities that make it attractive for manufacturing.

The excitement around AI has gotten a bit frothy. Those two magic letters are everywhere, promising everything. Authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna want us all to take a beat and a more critical look, per their new book "The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want."Bender is a linguist at the University of Washington who helped popularize the term "stochastic parrots" to describe large language models. And Hanna is the director of research at the Distributed AI Institute, formerly an AI ethicist at Google. She says claims of AI's artistic prowess can be misleading.

The remedy phase of one of the antitrust cases against Google wrapped up last week and the judge is expected to issue his decision by August on how the company must address its monopoly in search. One option suggested by the Justice Department: ban Google from paying browsers to make its search engine the default. But Mozilla, the developer of the independent Firefox browser, has opposed this remedy. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Laura Chambers, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, about how the move would be crippling for smaller browsers like theirs.

There was a time not so long ago when it seemed like the most consequential conversations in our society were happening on social media. But as the digital commons spawned mobs, performative posturing and rage-baiting, a lot of those conversations went private. That's one takeaway from the recent Semafor report on the private group chats between tech titans, business leaders and public intellectuals. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Amy Webb, founder and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group, about the growth of what she calls the Splinternet.

On this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” OpenAI retreats from its pivot to profit after its plan to restructure the business hit some snags. Plus, we say goodbye to the old-school internet phone call platform - Skype. But first, the Department of Justice pushed for breaking up part of Google's advertising business by selling off two of its ad tech products, which Google says would be nearly impossible. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal, to discuss all these topics and more.

Vibe coding is having a moment.The buzzy new phrase was coined earlier this year by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy to describe his process of programming by prompting AI. It's been embraced by tech professionals and amateurs alike. Google, Microsoft and Apple have or are developing their own AI-assisted coding platforms while vibe coding startups like Cursor are raking in funding.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino recently spoke with Clarence Huang, vice president of technology at the financial software company Intuit and an early adopter of vibe coding, about how the practice has changed how he approaches building software.More on this“What is vibe coding, exactly?” - from MIT Technology Review“New ‘Slopsquatting’ Threat Emerges from AI-Generated Code Hallucinations” - from HackRead“Three-minute explainer on… slopsquatting” - from Raconteur

E-commerce sites like Temu and Shein might not be quite as cheap as they were a week ago now that tariffs are kicking in on even small-dollar imports. But these platforms known for selling low-cost goods from China have also sought to cut costs on delivery.They contract in the U.S. with companies like UniUni, which promises to dispatch packages for $3 or less — well below the industry standard. How UniUni delivers on those low rates is the subject of a recent investigation by reporter Theo Wayt at The Information. He tells Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that drivers are hired through a network of subcontractors and UniUni pays them per item rather than an hourly wage.

In an internal memo to his staff in April, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman wrote that “AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it's coming for my job too. This is a wake-up call. It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person - AI is coming for you.” Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Kaufman, about his "radical candor" on the subject and how he wanted to spur them to think creatively about how they can remain relevant in the face of fast-changing technology.

People are using chatbots in all kinds of ways — to search the web, get help with an online purchase, sometimes even for counseling. But there's a lot about this human-AI interaction we don't fully understand. Do these chatbots effectively combat loneliness or worsen social isolation? The answer — so far — is complicated, according to Cathy Fang, a second-year PhD student at MIT Media Lab who, along with researchers from OpenAI, studied how chatbot use affects human social and emotional wellbeing.

Meta launches its own, dedicated AI app that could go head to head with the likes of ChatGPT. Plus, a massive data leak put California Blue Shield members' most sensitive medical details at risk. And how is the health tech investment sector navigating all the recent economic uncertainty from the Trump Administration’s latest trade war? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino and Christina Farr, managing director at Manatt Health, explore all these topics on this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

When President Jimmy Carter died late last year, the foundation that runs Wikipedia noticed something unusual: the flood of interest in the late president created a content bottleneck, slowing load times for about an hour.Wikipedia is built to handle spikes in traffic like this, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, but it's also dealing with a surge of bots scraping the site to train AI models, and clogging up its servers in the process, the organization’s chief product and technology officer Selena Deckelmann told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

Canada's liberal party and its leader Mark Carney are set to remain in control after the country held federal elections Monday. They were the first since Canada adopted the Online News Act in 2023, which requires online content providers — like social media platforms — to negotiate some sort of "fair" payment to news publishers in exchange for using their content. They can also do what Meta did — block news from their Facebook and Instagram platforms altogether. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Marketplace Senior Washington Correspondent Kimberly Adams, who’s been reporting on the election from Canada, to learn more about that law and what happened to the online news environment after it passed.

One of the most powerful tools in the fight against climate change is the money sitting in investment portfolios - especially the trillions of dollars invested on behalf of public retirees. That’s money that could continue to fund fossil fuel development, or help pay for  climate solutions instead.New York City has implemented an ambitious Net Zero plan for its public pensions. That plan includes divesting from some fossil fuel companies and investing billions of dollars in climate solutions. One company benefiting from that investment is NineDot Energy.   Wedged between an elementary school and a big box shopping center in the Northeast Bronx, NineDot Energy is operating a battery farm that the city’s utility company, Con Ed, can call on to help relieve the grid when it gets overstressed. “The batteries hold a combined three megawatts of battery storage. That’s enough to power about 3,000 New York City households for four hours on a hot summer day. Last summer, the battery farm was called half a dozen times,

Leyla Isik, a professor of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University, is also a senior scientist on a new study looking at how good AI is at reading social cues. She and her research team took short videos of people doing things — two people chatting, two babies on a playmat, two people doing a synchronized skate routine — and showed them to human participants. After, they were asked them questions like, are these two communicating with each other? Are they communicating? Is it a positive or negative interaction? Then, they showed the same videos to over 350 open source AI models. (Which is a lot, though it didn't include all the latest and greatest ones out there.) Isik found that the AI models were a lot worse than humans at understanding what was going on. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes visited Isik at her lab in Johns Hopkins to discuss the findings.

It's the last Friday in April and it's time for Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review. This week, we'll talk about how the Federal Trade Commission is suing Uber over its subscription service.Plus, how the VC world is navigating the uncertainty created by the trade war.But first, a nonprofit pivot is facing some challenges. Open AI, the maker of ChatGPT was founded about a decade ago as a nonprofit research lab. It's now looking to restructure as a for-profit — specifically, a public benefit corporationBut that transformation is facing resistance. About 10 former Open AI employees, along with several Nobel laureates and other experts, have written an open letter asking regulators in California and Delaware to block the change. They argue that nonprofit control is crucial to Open AI's mission, which is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, about how unu

TikTok is going to be testing a new crowd-sourced fact-checking system called Footnotes. It’s seems similar to the Community Notes systems already in use on other social media, such as X and Facebook. TikTok is also keeping its current fact-checking systems in place. The way these community systems generally work is, say someone makes a post stating "whales are the biggest fish out there." Another user could add a note saying "actually, whales are mammals, and here's a source with more information."Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Vanderbilt psychology professor Lisa Fazio about why this model of "citizen fact-checking" is catching on.

The use of algorithmic software in setting residential rents has come under scrutiny in recent years. In 2024, the Joe Biden administration sued real estate company RealPage, alleging that its algorithm, which aggregates and analyzes private data on the housing market, enables landlords to collude in pricing and stifles competition. There's no word yet on what the second Donald Trump administration's Justice Department will do with this case. But in the meantime, some cities are banning the use of these algorithms completely. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Robbie Sequeira, who has been reporting on the issue for Stateline.

We've sometimes wished we could have our own Wendy Rhodes, the performance coach at the hedge fund on the TV show “Billions.” Most workplaces, however, aren't bringing in billions and can't afford a Wendy. But an upskilling platform called Multiverse uses artificial intelligence to provide personalized, on-the-job guidance. Its AI coach, Atlas, helps workers expand their abilities and keep themselves relevant in an economy that makes skills obsolete faster than ever before, says Ujjwal Singh, chief product and technology officer at Multiverse.

Developers of mobile apps have "room for improvement" in making their platforms fully accessible for disabled users, according to a new report from the software company ArcTouch and the digital research platform Fable. It looked at fifty popular apps and assessed them for features that improve accessibility like screen reading, text size adjustability, voice controls and multiple screen orientations. The apps were tested by disabled users who reported a poor or failing experience almost three-quarters of the time.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ben Ogilvie, head of accessibility at ArcTouch, to learn more about why so many apps are behind.