Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

On this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we take a look at Nvidia's changing investment relationship with OpenAI. Plus, a stormy start for the new U.S. version of TikTok. But first, SpaceX, one of the world’s largest rocket companies, announced this week that it’s buying xAI, a two-and-half-year-old artificial intelligence startup. Both companies are controlled by Elon Musk. The new company is reportedly valued at $1.25 trillion. It means the chatbot Grok, the satellite internet company Starlink, and the social media firm X are all going to co-exist under the same rocket hangar. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about what adding these companies together equals.

A landmark lawsuit that accuses social media companies of intentionally designing their platforms to be addictive — and causing harm to children and teenagers' mental health — is in court this week in Los Angeles.The defendants in this case are Meta and YouTube, both of which dispute the allegations. Snap and TikTok both settled in advance of the trial.Some are calling this social media's "Big Tobacco" moment. Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, discusses this as well as a series of lawsuits against the social media giants.

You can get a pretty good workout plan from a chatbot, but the tech is also being incorporated into all kinds of existing fitness apps, from Apple's Workout Buddy, which motivates you through earbuds, to the Fitbit AI health coach, to Peloton's AI-enabled camera that tracks your form.Nicole Nguyen, personal tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal, gave some of the most popular ones a spin. She spoke with “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino about her experience.

In his new book, Wall Street Journal tech columnist Christopher Mims offers a guide for getting the most out of the technology. He's compiled two dozen "Laws of AI" to shed light on the best ways to use these generative tools.Yesterday we talked about how individuals can improve their productivity with AI, and today we're digging into how organizations can use — or sometimes misuse — it.

With all the fanfare surrounding AI these days — the utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares — it can be hard to see the technology as simply a tool that anyone can use to improve their lives.That's what tech columnist Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal focuses on his new book "How to AI: Cut Through the Hype. Master the Basics. Transform Your Work.” In it, he outlines two dozen “AI Laws” for how consumers and organizations should think about AI.First up: AI is an assistant, not a replacement.

Is AI a bubble? It's the trillion-dollar question in the economy. So Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino decided to look to history for some answers in this week’s special episode of “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” McCarty Carino spoke with David A. Kirsch, a historian and management professor at the University of Maryland. He’s also co-author of the book "Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation." He and Brent Goldfarb looked at patterns over 150 years of technological breakthroughs, from broadcast radio to rayon and came up with a model of the conditions that most often lead to bubbles.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino takes a tour of Redwood Material’s new R&D Lab with CTO Colin Campbell. Redwood, an EV battery recycling startup, is now offering off-grid, renewable energy grids to AI data centers and it’s looking to scale up its operations in this AI boom.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Paul Vixie, vice president at AWS Security and an early internet innovator, about the rapid buildout of fiber optic networks during the dot-com boom, and what happened when the bubble burst.

529 Bryant St. in Palo Alto, California, is home to a key landmark in tech history. Now owned and operated as a data center by Equinix, the building has been a networking hub to a variety of firms, including the earliest telephone switch board operators and early internet firms like Alta Vista. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino visited the data center to learn more.

Billions of dollars has been poured into the AI economy in recent years. As part of a new series about what the AI economy means for you, Marketplace Tech is looking at the infrastructure build-out behind the AI boom, starting with a visit to an Amazon Web Service lab in Cupertino, California, where AWS developers are squeezing as much networking efficiency out of their servers as possible for their AI ambitions.

A Micron memory chip factory in upstate New York is wrangling with local groups who want legal assurances the project will benefit the local community. Plus, YouTube plans to crack down on AI slop.But first, it's shaping up to be a big year for very big initial public offerings. Elon Musk is reportedly preparing to take SpaceX public at an anticipated valuation of around $1.5 trillion. AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI are also expected to follow suit this year.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, to discuss all these topics on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

In the era of AI, sometimes a story is really just too good to be true, even if the initial evidence suggests otherwise.And as artificially engineered content becomes mainstream, journalists need to go the extra mile to verify a story’s authenticity.Casey Newton from Platformer spoke with “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino about his recent wild goose chase that ended in an AI hoax.

Information Apocalypse Now.AI content is flooding social feeds and its getting increasingly hard to determine what is real versus what is fake. Aviv Ovadya, founder and CEO of the AI and Democracy Foundation, has been warning of this apocalypse for a decade now. “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ovadya about the state of our information ecosystem and protecting our institutions.

Consumers have heard of “dynamic pricing,” when the prices are based on demand within a single moment. But whether they know it or not, they’re also contending with “surveillance pricing,” where companies use personalized consumer data to serve up personalized prices. Marketplace's Kristin Schwab reports.

In an industry known for pushing the bounds of human innovation, tech elites are now trying to push the bounds of their own bodies. The hot new biohacking trend is injectable peptides — similar to the ones found in GLP-1 medications like Ozempic. But these are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.These gray-market peptides, largely from Chinese manufacturers, are being used by tech workers and founders. Not just to lose weight, but to optimize their health and performance in all manner of ways. “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with independent journalist Jasmine Sun, who recently wrote about this for the New York Times.

Those massive AI data centers going in across the country can use as much energy as an entire city. President Trump said this week he wants tech companies to "pay their own way," and touted a new Microsoft pledge to bear the full cost of their AI energy needs.Plus, Apple announces its long awaited new AI Siri will be powered by Google.But first, Nvidia can once again export its second best H200 chips to China if it follows some new security rules and pays the U.S. government 25% of its sales. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, to discuss all these topics on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

When it comes to AI, educators biggest worry: cheating.With the click of a button, students can form papers, generate test answers or even finish their homework. Leading educators to address its use directly and the expectations for their students.But Kristi Girdharry, director of the writing center and associate professor at Babson College, has gone a step further. She’s actively integrating AI into her coursework. All in the hopes that her students learn to outwork their robot counterparts.“I have a mantra going with my students now,” said Girdharry. “I always say, ‘you have to be better than a robot.’”

The pretty Swiss lakeside town of Lugano has set out to become Europe’s bitcoin capital, with the aim of attracting bitcoin companies and the cryptocurrency itself to the city. In Lugano, you can still pay for everything in Swiss francs, but in hundreds of shops and restaurants you can also pay in bitcoin. The city has even started accepting it for municipal services. The BBC’s John Laurenson went to check it out.

Much like graphics processing units, high bandwidth memory is essential for training and running AI. It's paired with all those NVIDIA chips that have been selling like hotcakes and only a small handful companies in the world make it. Now the surge in demand from data centers has created a global shortage for everything else — the PCs and smartphones and other consumer electronics that also use memory chips. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Tom Mainelli, vice president of device and consumer research at IDC, about how long this shortage could last.

On Jan. 7, 2025, the Eaton and Palisades Fires began, killing 31 people and destroying around 13,00 homes in the Los Angeles area. A year later, residents are looking to rebuild the lives and homes they once had. Marketplace’s David Branccacio and his wife lost their Altadena home to the Eaton fire, and have yet to break ground on a new building. But as they continue to plan for construction in the new year, they are focusing on fire-resistance for the future.Branccacio joined “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino to speak about the technology and building that goes into fire-resistant homes.