Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

Another lawsuit hits the Department of Government Efficiency from privacy rights advocates concerned about Americans’ personal data. And another wearable — the Ai Pin — bites the dust. But first, layoffs by the federal government are continuing, including, reportedly, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, which is part of the Commerce Department. This is a federal laboratory that’s been around since 1901 whose mission is to promote U.S. innovation and competition. And part of its work is to help create standards for new technology, like artificial intelligence. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories. Curi recently reported that NIST is expected to fire about 500 workers. But what does NIST do, exactly?

The Washington Post reported earlier this month that representatives of DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency — gained access to sensitive data at the Department of Education and fed it into AI software.This has raised red flags over whether it violates federal privacy law. We reached out to DOGE for comment, but didn’t hear back.But there are ways to use AI to improve efficiency without raising privacy concerns. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Kevin Frazier, contributing editor at the publication Lawfare, about how the government has used AI in the past and how it could use it more responsibly in the future.The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Kevin Frazier: The federal government’s use of AI really spans decades, if we’re going to be honest, because how you define AI is a whole, other hour-long conversation, if not two-hour-long conversation. But here we can even just look back to the end of 2024 when we had an inventory done of the federal government’s use cases o

404: Page Not Found. That error message has become a more common sight on government websites. Many — reportedly thousands — of federal government webpages were recently taken down, ranging from Census Bureau research on depression among LGBT adults to Food and Drug Administration guidance for making clinical trials more diverse.These erasures come after President Donald Trump signed executive orders cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and what he calls gender ideology.Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jack Cushman, director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and a contributor to the End of Term archive project, which works to preserve government sites before a new administration takes over. They discussed his recent work archiving those sites and data sets and what’s lost when these digital artifacts are not properly archived.The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Jack Cushman: I think one way to put it is that a great deal has been archived, and espec

Venture capitalists have been welcomed into the Donald Trump administration, and their presence is growing. People who’ve been in the business of backing startups have been tapped to run the Office of Personnel Management and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Another, David Sacks, is the White House artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar.Even the vice president, JD Vance, spent time making venture deals before he moved into politics.Sarah Kunst, founder and managing director at Cleo Capital, says that in venture capital, you have to be good at saying no and comfortable taking risks knowing they likely won’t pan out. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes asked Kunst what it means to bring these qualities to the federal government. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Sarah Kunst: I think that that’s probably going to be a bit of a culture clash. The government and the people in America shouldn’t sort of be treated to a culture where it’s fine if 90%-plus fail as long as one or

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.Lottie Hayton lost both her parents within two months of each other. As a young journalist she wanted to write about it, and in particular to investigate a new tech genre known as “grief tech,” or “ghostbots”.An industry is emerging that uses artificial intelligence to build chatbots of people who’ve died with the aim of offering solace to those who’ve lost loved ones.Hayton made a chatbot version of her dad and a visual talking avatar of her mom.“My drive to try it was, I guess, in order to provide other people who might be using it with information,” said Hayton.“The bot sort of blinks and moves slightly like she did, that was quite alarming. The face moves in a juddery way but it very much looked like her and that threw me off,” she added. “It had an air of her, but it was definitely robotic. I was inherently aware that this was a piece of technology.”Within the last five years, the idea of digital resurrections have gone from science fiction to reality.

On this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we’ll talk about Apple launching a new health research study and BuzzFeed starting a new social media platform. But first, the U.S. is pushing back against global AI regulation. This week there was a kind of who’s who of AI and government at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly said there should be rules for this technology and that AI cannot be the Wild West. But the country that’s home to the original Wild West wants to forge ahead. U.S. Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech underlining the Donald Trump administration’s intent to develop AI without worrying about the risks. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at the venture firm Collab Capital, about these topics for this week’s “Tech Bytes.”

There’s a concept in business called the first-mover advantage. Basically, it means that if you’re the first company with a successful product in a new market, you have the opportunity to dominate the market and fend off rivals.But that advantage can be short-lived. Take Netscape, which produced Navigator, the first popular commercial web browser. Then Microsoft entered the field with Internet Explorer, and it wasn’t long before Navigator crashed.In the world of AI chatbots, two of the first movers are OpenAI and Anthropic. But recently the Chinese company DeepSeek made a splash with an AI chatbot that it reportedly developed for a fraction of what its competitors have spent.Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with historian Margaret O’Mara, author of the book “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,” about whether America’s artificial intelligence industry should be worried about newcomers like DeepSeek.The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Margaret O’Mara: There’s this d

Data centers are filled with servers, basically a bunch of beefed-up computers stacked on top of each other in buildings that can be as big as warehouses. So they need a lot of electricity. And there are more of those projects in the works. For example, Meta has said it’s planning to build out at least one data center that’s going to be so big it could cover a good chunk of Manhattan. Wall Street Journal tech reporter Meghan Bobrowsky explained to Hughes what kinds of companies are benefitting from this data center construction boom.

About 1 in 4 U.S. jobs requires an occupational license, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Licensing requirements differ by state and can apply to everyone from barbers to lawyers. The general idea, of course, is to keep unqualified workers out.But technology, and specifically artificial intelligence, is making inroads. Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, is also author of the new book “The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong.” She told Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes that in some instances, AI is letting consumers bypass licensed workers altogether. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Rebecca Haw Allensworth: This has been true for a while, but it’s really become intense now that AI is what it is. You can go on ChatGPT and say something like, write me a contract for funeral services, and ChatGPT will spit out a contract. That has forever been the practice of law, and that’s been limited,

Geography has been part of President Trump’s agenda. His first day on the job, he signed an executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and Denali, the highest peak in North America, will now go back to being called Mount McKinley.Private companies that make maps — analog or digital — don’t have to follow suit but at least one is.Google said in a post on X that it has long had a practice of applying name changes from official government sources. So, once the official federal naming database is changed, it’ll update Google Maps for people in the US.Marketplace Tech reached out to Google, Apple and Microsoft for a statement clarifying their approach to renaming bodies on their digital maps. Apple and Microsoft did not provide one. Google redirected us to their X post.Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with, Sterling Quinn Professor of Geography at Central Washington University, about whether tech companies generally have standard operating procedures around name changes. Th

On this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we’ll explore OpenAI’s inroads in higher education. Plus, how passengers can get on a waitlist to hail a driverless car in Austin, Texas. But first, a look at how Google is changing its approach to artificial intelligence. In 2018, the company published its “AI principles,” guidelines for how it believed AI should be built and used. Google originally included language that said it would not design or deploy AI to be used in weapons or surveillance. That language has now gone away. Google didn’t respond to our request for comment, but it did say in a blog post this week that companies and governments should work together to create AI that, among other things, supports national security. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, about these topics for this week’s “Tech Bytes.” 

Congress considered 158 bills that mention artificial intelligence over the past two years, according to a count by the Brennan Center for Justice. But zero comprehensive AI laws have been passed.There has been movement by states, however. In Tennessee, for example, the ELVIS Act, which protects voices and likenesses from unauthorized use by AI, became law in March. In Colorado, a law that takes effect in 2026 requires developers of high-risk AI systems to protect consumers from algorithm-based discrimination.But some who fund AI technology say a federal law is needed. That includes Matt Perault, head of AI policy at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The following is an edited transcript of his conversation with Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes.Matt Perault: We think it’s really important at the current moment to have a national competitiveness strategy for AI policy. We’re at a Sputnik moment right now with the release of DeepSeek, and we’re not going to be able to do that if we have a state-by-st

Among President Donald Trump’s many executive orders is one calling for a “next-generation missile defense shield.” The White House calls this the Iron Dome for America.The order says it should defend against all sorts of missile attacks and include “space-based interceptors” that could potentially act as both sensors and weapons.It reminded retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Latiff of a Ronald Reagan-era program he worked on: the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, known popularly, and especially to its critics, as “Star Wars.”Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Latiff about whether the U.S. has the technology, money and time to make this grand project work. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Robert Latiff: Yes and no. Yes, we do have sensor technologies. We have the launch technologies. Whether or not we have the technologies to lash it all together and make it work, I think, is an open question.Stephanie Hughes: And President Trump has compared this to the defense shield us

One of the more hopeful scenarios for how artificial intelligence could affect jobs is that it would take over more of the boring grunt work and free up humans for loftier pursuits.Mondelez, the company behind many of America’s favorite snacks, like Oreo cookies, Sour Patch Kids candy and Ritz crackers, is trying to do just that — using AI to speed up innovation for food scientists and give their taste buds a break.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Wall Street Journal reporter Isabelle Bousquette about how AI is changing the snack game. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Isabelle Bousquette: When they are, you know, creating these new recipes, it used to be a process that was, you know, fairly trial-and-error based, and the process is still fairly similar now with this AI tool, except what the AI is doing is it’s giving the scientists the ability to actually go in and tick the box for the flavor characteristics that they’re looking for. They can tick a box if they want it

Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, has long been the holy grail of innovation — a synthetic intelligence with all the capabilities of a human mind or more. Recent advances in AI have many predicting we could be closer to achieving it than we’re ready for.It’s a reality that preoccupied the late diplomat Henry Kissinger before he died last year at 100 years old. He collaborated with Eric Schmidt, formerly at Google, and Craig Mundie, formerly at Microsoft, on the new book “Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit.” Mundie joined Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss what a future with superintelligence might look like. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation:Craig Mundie: As it relates to the government issues, it affects many things. As we’ve seen in the applications to misinformation, people can use it to try to affect how democracies work. On the other hand, authoritarian governments [may] say, well, this is the greatest thing ever in terms of me being a

Everyone was obsessed with the new white whale of the AI world this week. We’ll get into it on today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, Trump floats tariffs on semiconductors from overseas. And a bipartisan Senate bill to ban kids from social media is getting another look. But first, back to that DeepSeek drama. The Chinese AI company took the world and the markets by storm with claims that its class-leading large language model was built at a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley rivals. DeepSeek claims it spent only $6 million on compute power — at least 16 times less than leading U.S. companies. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these topics for this week’s Tech Bytes.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been seen by many as a boost for cryptocurrency. During the campaign, he made several crypto-friendly pledges and recently made a splash when he launched his own “meme coin” shortly before the inauguration.The Trump token reached a nearly a $15 billion valuation, though it has since fallen quite a bit. But it continues to provoke questions, like, is creating this investment vehicle a conflict of interest for a high-ranking official? And what the heck is a meme coin anyway?Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios reporter Brady Dale, author of the Axios Crypto newsletter, to get some answers.The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Brady Dale: They’re a speculative instrument that, I sort of view them as a game. You know, there are these cryptocurrencies that capture an idea. So the most famous one is dogecoin — that funny dog that everyone sees all over the internet — and then, you know, these days there’s this blockchain ca

Amid all the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump during his first week in office came a promise to “restore freedom of speech” and end federal censorship. Keen observers may note that freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution.But the order seems to have something more specific in mind. It calls out what it characterizes as the Biden administration’s pressure campaign on social media companies to “moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech under the guise of combatting misinformation.”Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer at The Washington Post, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that the order is a signal of the president’s continued focus on content moderation online. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation:Will Oremus: What [Trump is] doing, though, is equating censorship with online content moderation and rules around what people can say online. And in particular, he uses the executive order to assert that the Biden administration abused its power w

There’s no shortage of bullish voices on artificial intelligence among the titans of tech. But even many of the leading evangelists, in addition to prevailing pop culture narratives, tend to strike a note of impending doom when envisioning the future of the technology. Reid Hoffman wants us to consider the alternative. He’s the co-founder of LinkedIn, and a founding investor and former board member of OpenAI before he branched into other ventures, like Inflection AI. And his new book “Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future?” explores those alternatives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Hoffman about what he means by the idea of “superagency.”

Last week’s annual gathering of the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was a bit overshadowed by the inauguration of Donald Trump in the U.S. The president made a virtual appearance at the conference, delivering a speech that hit on several of his recurring themes: tariffs, inflation and artificial intelligence. AI has been a big topic at the summit for several years. But the way it was treated this year felt different, according to Reed Albergotti, tech editor at news website Semafor. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino caught up with Albergotti just as he was wrapping up his reporting at Davos.