Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

There's a provision tucked into the Big Beautiful Bill, among the tax cuts and Medicaid cuts, that would bar states from passing laws to regulate artificial intelligence for a decade. Plus, Meta is reshuffling its AI team again in an apparent attempt to catch up to the competition. But first, this week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a law requiring age verification for Apple and Google app stores. It also requires parental consent for app downloads and in-app purchases by minors. But it raises some legal questions. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to discuss all this.

The New York City Administration for Children's Services, or ACS, has been using predictive artificial intelligence to flag some families for greater scrutiny, according to a recent investigation by The Markup. Colin Lecher reported the story and tells Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino, like all AI systems, it can encode historical biases.

In late April, details came to light about a covert experiment conducted by researchers from the University of Zurich on unsuspecting Reddit users on the debate forum known as r/changemyview. They used AI chatbots posing as real humans on the forum to test their powers of persuasion and invented backstories like a rape survivor or a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter. What they didn't have was consent. The experiment violated Reddit Terms of Service, forum rules and, critics say, academic research standards. The researchers who notified Reddit of the experiment after the fact have since apologized and said they won't publish the results. Reddit says it's increasing efforts to verify users are human. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Mohammad Hosseini, a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, about the potential harms that could come from a study like this one.

Big Tech firms like Microsoft, Meta and Google are using stricter performance reviews to bring up productivity and weed out low performing workers. It’s a noticeable pivot away from the perks that defined Silicon Valley work culture a decade ago. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Alistair Barr, author of the Business Insider Tech Memo Newsletter, about their recent coverage of this latest shift.

Digital banking is often seen as a smoother, less costly way to deliver financial services. But where there’s tech, there are sometimes outages. Bank customers in the U.K. and other countries have seen an increasing number of banking interruptions, often with costly impacts.

On this week’s episode of Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week In Review, President Donald Trump signed the "Take It Down" Act, which requires internet publishers to take down intimate images like revenge porn or deepfakes within 48 hours of a complaint. Google unveiled a suite of new AI products, upgrades and projects at its annual I/O developers conference. And the game Fortnite finally returns to the Apple App Store after a long legal drama. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at WIRED, to discuss all these topics and more.

This week, we hit the road to check out California’s Central Valley, where the future of agricultural innovation is taking shape. We visited a farm that’s piloting next-gen tools and a university research center that’s helping develop that tech. Today, we’re at an AgTEC Workforce graduation, a community college program in this region that helps upskill farm workers.

This week, we’re heading to California’s Central Valley to see how technology is transforming this agricultural region. And we’re going straight to the innovation source: the University of California, Merced, where academics there are guiding students to research agtech innovations to potentially develop them for commercialization.

California is known for being home to Hollywood and Silicon Valley. But the Golden State also has millions of acres of farmland, and we’re exploring how technology is changing that landscape in a series this week about “Agtech Valley.”We visited HMC Farms with its farm manager Drew Ketelsen, who took us to an orchard of Lady Erin yellow peach trees trained to grow in narrow upright pillars rather than the usual rounded shape.

Having a baby in the era of apps, influencers, subreddits and Facebook groups, has its ups and downs.Journalist Amanda Hess thought she knew all about it as an internet culture writer for the New York Times, but found herself surprised when she was the one expecting.She writes about how pregnancy magnified her relationship with technology in a new memoir, “Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age.”It begins, actually before conception — with the period-tracking app, Flo Health.

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.