Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

Search engines, social media, e-commerce, and mobile games all make money by selling advertising. But making ads work in AI search might not be so straight forward. Perplexity, for instance, reportedly pulled back on plans to integrate ads into their AI search engine. And internal documents showed the company made only $20,000 in ad revenue in the fourth quarter last year. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Garrett Johnson, professor of marketing at Boston University to get a sense of why jumping into the ad business is difficult.

A career in tech was once seen as a safe bet — the jobs were plentiful, the pay was ample. But this year the tech sector had another “meh” year for hiring according to the job site Indeed. Tech jobs have been declining now for several years, but this year, the losses at least seemed to stabilize, according to Indeed's latest Jobs & Hiring Trends Report. Still, job postings in the industry remain well below their pre-pandemic baseline. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Indeed senior economist Cory Stahle for a look at how this year turned out for the tech job market.

Tech giants are estimated to have spent almost $400 billion in capital expenditures this year, mostly to build data centers for artificial intelligence. A single massive facility can have a price tag in the billions of dollars.And many states want in on that spending spree. Thirty-seven states have some sort of incentive program to attract data centers with the hope of bringing a boost to their local economies. They're giving away hundreds of millions in tax exemptions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nicholas Miller, policy associate at NCSL, to learn more.

Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at NYU, explains the differences between large language models and "world models" — and why he thinks the latter are key to achieving artificial general intelligence.

There’s been something of a critical mass of high-profile departures and retirement announcements at Apple in recent weeks. Plus, how will consumers be helped or hurt by a potential merger between Netflix and Warner Bros or a hostile takeover from Paramount? And McDonald's pulls an AI-generated Christmas ad because some folks on social media weren't “lovin' it.” Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal for this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

The AI boom is propelling a once-obscure group of state regulators into key decision-making roles for the economy. AI needs data centers, data centers need power and power is generally regulated in some way — depending on the state — by public utilities commissions.That's the topic of a new report from the Center on Technology Policy at NYU. Scott Brennen, CTP director and author of the report, said these commissions often make decisions on planning and permitting for new infrastructure and decide the rates utilities charge consumers.

The extended Black Friday sale season means a lot of people have been buying new TVs. The top sets today can display in up to 8K Ultra High Definition, they have deeper blacks, brighter highlights and are thinner and lighter-weight than ever. And yet, modern TVs have their haters — a dedicated group of purists who find them lacking, and would rather hunt down a good old fashioned used plasma.

Prosthetic limbs can be expensive, costing thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. So the industry seemed ripe for disruption when 3D printing came along. The technology requires little labor and uses economical materials. But the reality of 3D printing prosthetic limbs isn’t that straightforward, according to writer and University of California, Berkeley, lecturer Britt Young, who uses a prosthetic arm. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Young about why 3D printing has yet to bring down prosthesis costs.

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. Darja Djordjevic, an adolescent and adult psychiatrist who co-authored the research, the bots aren't equipped to provide the kind of emotional support young people need when dealing with a mental health issue.Dr. Djordjevic and her team simulated conversations involving various mental health concerns with four of the most popular consumer chatbots and identified several risks; chiefly, their tendency to be sycophantic. A note, this conversation mentions suicide and self-harm.

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 congressional National Defense Authorization Act appears to have failed. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Tuesday that GOP leadership is now “looking at other places” to include that measure after reportedly facing pushback from both parties.Plus, New York recently became the first state to enforce an AI law designed to protect consumers from "algorithmic pricing." And Amazon pulled back on AI dubbing for some international content after anime fans complained.

Every day, consumers are confronted with the fragility of our personal data privacy — another data breach, another government agency accessing databases they didn't previously have access to, another consent form popping up to get permission to gather more data.It's almost too much for any one person to keep a handle on, according to Rohan Grover, professor of artificial intelligence and media at American University. He recently co-authored a piece for The Conversation about why data privacy seems to have largely fallen out of the public discourse, even though he says the topic is more urgent than ever.

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 Ratliff decided to put the idea to the test in the newest season of his podcast, “Shell Game,” where Ratliff and his team of synthetic co-founders, executives and workers launched their startup, HurumoAI. His AI agents designed a logo, built a website and eventually released their own agentic AI service. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ratliff about what he learned from this whole experience.

Robots are commonplace in factories, and increasingly in warehouses like those run by Amazon. But what about robots to help with household chores — so-called humanoids to load the dishwasher or fold the laundry?To find out, we checked in with Ken Goldberg, professor of engineering at UC Berkeley and co-founder of the AI and robotics company Ambi Robotics. He spoke to Marketplace’s Nova Safo en route from a robotics conference in China.

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, a relationship therapist.

Accessibility has long been aided by the advancement of technology. When it comes to artificial intelligence, accessibility is top of mind for Taylor Arndt, Chief Operations Officer at Techopolis Online Solutions. Arndt has been blind since birth, and so accessibility has been a lifelong battle. When she was in school, she often received physical materials she was unable to read. So, she bought her own hand-held scanner and downloaded a screen reader. At 14, Arndt taught herself to code. Now as a coder working on AI, Arndt says in order for it to help others, the AI models need to be trained on data that has already incorporated accessibility measures.

Sub-Saharan Africa has a youth unemployment problem. The latest figures from the International Labour Organisation show more than one in five young people there are "NEET": Not in Employment, Education or Training. Structural issues like the lack of political stability in many countries and lagging infrastructure remain major barriers to high quality job creation. But the gig economy has been growing rapidly thanks to the proliferation of digital platforms. The The BBC's Wairimu Gitani reports.

Hannah Quay-de la Vallee, senior technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, coauthored a recent report that recommends more transparency on what artificial intelligence education technologies can and cannot do.

In the Trump administration's efforts to shrink and realign the federal government, datasets on climate, health and demographics have disappeared. Some have been scrubbed from public view, others may not be collected anymore. This data supported apps and interactive tools many researchers relied upon.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Denice Ross, senior advisor with the Federation of American Scientists and former chief data scientist for the U.S., who recently wrote a tribute to the data that's been lost.

Dr. Carlos Chaccour, physician scientist at the University of Navarra, noticed something fishy about a letter to the editor the New England Journal of Medicine received shortly after it published a paper of his on malaria treatment in July.The letter was riddled with strange errors such as critiques supposedly based on other research Chaccour himself had written. So he and his co-author Matthew Rudd decided to dig deeper.They analyzed patterns of letters to the editor over the last decade and found a remarkable increase in what they call "prolific debutantes" — new authors who suddenly had dozens, even hundreds of letters published, starting right around the time OpenAI’s ChatGPT came out.Why would academics want to do this? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Chaccour to find out.

The holiday shopping season is here, and AI companies are pushing new chatbot retail partnerships. But, can these tools deliver on their promises to make shopping easier? Plus, the return of Vine, the beloved video app known for its ultra-short absurdist memes.But first, Meta is not a monopoly, according to a federal judge’s ruling this week in the longstanding antitrust case against the social media giant, which claimed Meta had stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, to discuss all of the above on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”