Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

Big tech companies have invested hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure, including data centers that are popping up all over the country. Constructing the facilities brings in jobs to local communities, but what happens once the construction is finished? Former Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Pat Harker says tech companies owe a longer-lasting benefit to the communities that host data centers.Marketplace tech host Nova Safo talked with Pat Harker about his proposal for a “digital AI land grant act.”

Rya Jetha, tech culture reporter at The San Francisco Standard, spends a lot of time thinking about the industry’s internal dynamics. Gone are the computer programmers, self-proclaimed nerds of an era mostly focused on software development. Jetha says the new tech bro is of the “hard tech” era, with emphasis on the charisma needed to raise huge sums of money for expensive hardware innovations and AI technologies.

OpenAI’s latest AI video generator Sora 2 has gotten a lot of attention for its realistic creations. The tool is supposed to have guardrails to prevent creating videos based on misinformation. But new analysis from watchdog group Newsguard found that, when prompted, Sora 2 often generated videos based on lies, such as false claims having to do with election fraud in a foreign country or that a toddler was detained by immigration agents.Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Sofia Rubinson, senior editor at Newsguard, to learn more.

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is serving 25 years in federal prison for fraud. His company collapsed and went bankrupt in 2022. Investigators found that billions of dollars in customer funds had been borrowed without permission to help shore up Bankman-Fried’s other firm, Alameda Research. But throughout the last three years, Bankman-Fried has maintained his innocence, and he's filed an appeal. A hearing is scheduled for Nov. 4.Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Jonathan Jones, a reporter and producer for the investigative podcast “Reveal,” who spent hours talking to the former CEO, FTX insiders and customers.

Several major firms announced tens of thousands of job layoffs this week, and some reports are putting the blame on AI. Plus, startup Character.AI says it will ban minors from interacting with its chatbots. Also, Nvidia became the first $5 trillion company. We'll look at what that means. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with regular contributor Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, about all these topics on this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

Graphics processing units are essential to training and deploying artificial intelligence models, but they don’t come cheap. Big Tech companies like Meta, Microsoft and xAI have spent billions, amassing hundreds of thousands or even millions of them. For those without such deep pockets, access to this kind of computing power has gotten out of reach. Recently, the state of California launched an initiative called CalCompute to look into building its own public GPU cluster for startups and non-profit researchers to use. There are similar public compute pilots in New York state and at the federal level. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino tells us more.

Beijing is making it easier for global science and tech talent to visit or do business in China. Chinese officials opened a new K visa for graduates in science, technology, engineering and math to do research and start companies. This comes as the U.S. is cutting research grants and choking H-1B talent visas. Overseas, analysts say America’s loss could be China’s gain. But within China, there is a lot of anger over the K visa. Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak explains from Shanghai.

In his new book, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales writes ”in the early years of the internet, we were right to be bullish about people and the technology. Our capacity for social connection, community and cooperation can deliver amazing things. But the very same human nature can deliver atrocities.”Wales’s says he wrote this book to help combat a crisis of trust in society that is leading to the rise of authoritarianism. Marketplace’s Nova Safo asked him about the main lessons he learned from building Wikipedia into a highly-relied-upon source of information.

There are a lot of trending videos of people using face recognition tools to find cheating partners on dating apps. On TikTok, for example, videos have gone viral about people explaining how to use the tools like Cheater Buster, plus other staged videos of supposed partners catching their significant other on Tinder.Joseph Cox, tech reporter at 404 Media, looked into the sudden rise of these services and the risks they pose to privacy.

OpenAI released its new web browser, Atlas, in a bid to become our main conduit to the internet. Plus, we learned this week that Amazon may be planning to expand its use of robots and shrink its use of humans at its warehouses. And this week's disruptive outage at Amazon Web Services reminded us of just how much we depend on cloud computing, even for a good night's sleep. Marketplace’s Nova Safo discussed all of this with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at the venture firm Collab Capital, for this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.