Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

X, formerly Twitter, is facing a global backlash because users are directing the platform's AI chatbot, Grok, to generate non-consensual intimate imagery. Users have been popping up in the replies of women — and sometimes minors — tagging Grok and asking it to generate images of them in bikinis or undressed.The company and its owner, Elon Musk, have both clarified illegal content will not be tolerated on the platform.Plus, President Donald Trump signed an executive order late last year aimed at blocking states from enforcing local AI regulations — something a majority have adopted in some form.And, Meta is a victim of its own success. Its new Ray-Ban smart glasses are selling too fast to keep up with demand.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to discuss all these topics on this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

For the past couple months, YouTube technologist Benn Jordan has been investigating Flock Safety surveillance cameras. With the help of 404 Media, they found that many of these cameras were not only tracking, zooming and following every passerby, but the footage was freely accessible on the internet.Jordan joined Marketplace Tech host Meghan McCarty Carino to talk about how he found the footage and the dangers the surveillance system poses to privacy and other civil liberties. Remember, Big Brother is always watching.

Over a century ago, farmers exchanged their horses and plows for the automated tractor. Generations of farmers have come, gone and watched technology transform their industry.Automation and biotechnology have continued to propel farming forward, but with the emergency of AI technology, farmers have gained another tool up their sleeve.Andrew Nelson is a fifth-generation farmer in Farmington, Washington, and he is now using his computer science degree to help tend to his crops.

Artificial intelligence isn't just chatbots. The technology is being integrated all across our economy and our lives. And that convergence of AI and robotics, biology and more is likely to be the most important tech trend in 2026, according to Futurist and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group, Amy Webb.

The 2024 presidential race was the first big election to happen in the new generative AI era. There have, of course, been major concerns that the technology could be used to deceive voters or interfere with the exercise of democracy. But so far, that kind of activity has been limited, according to Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst and coauthor of a recent report from the Center for Democracy and Technology.

The digital detox economy is estimated to grow to $20 billion by 2032. The gamification that got you addicted to your phone might be the key to putting it down.

When it comes to homebuilding, Ronda Conger, vice president of CBH Homes, wants to be like the Savannah Bananas.“We are out there trying to do things so differently,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons we embraced AI so quickly.”But there are growing fears that artificial intelligence will begin to replace human employees. For Conger’s team, the bots are doing the grunt work, so the real humans can shine.

2025 brought some new speed bumps for electric vehicle sales, namely the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It cut federal EV tax credits — up to $7,500 for new cars and $4,000 for used ones. Those incentives had been on the books in some form since 2008 and were expanded during the Biden administration. They expired at the end of September. Consumers rushed to take advantage before they disappeared, leading to record high sales earlier this year. But now the market faces an uncertain road ahead.Marketplace's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with her colleague Henry Epp about the outlook for EV sales in the U.S. now that federal tax credits are gone.

AI psychosis became a thing in 2025. That's when a chatbot leads a user into a delusional spiral.The technology's tendency to affirm what people say can result in conversations that become untethered from reality and, in the worst cases, has ended with real-world harms. Kashmir Hill has been reporting on this phenomenon for The New York Times.Content warning: This episode includes mention of self harm and suicide.

This year turned out to be a pretty big year for autonomous vehicles. Waymo is the leader in the robotaxi race and over the last year, its signature Jaguar electric vehicles have become a common sight on the streets and recently freeways of cities around the country.Companies like Uber and Zooks have expanded their fleets to several metropolitan areas. And Tesla finally rolled out its cybercab service in a limited capacity in Austin.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Kirsten Korosec, transportation editor at TechCrunch, about how the robotaxi became a common fixture on city streets this year.

About half of U.S. states now require some form of online age verification to prevent kids from accessing certain content — usually pornography. But in some cases, that also means broader categories of adult content that include social media. Drew Harwell, tech reporter at The Washington Post, has been following this.

Will Gottsegen, a staff writer at The Atlantic, tests out Meta’s AI smart glasses and gives us a recap of how AI continues to get embedded in consumer tech.

Polystyrene is the chemical compound that makes up styrofoam, which is used for packaging and insulation. But it’s not the most environmentally friendly.By one estimate, 40 million tons of polystyrene were produced globally in 2024, leaving millions of tons of plastic waste. The search for an earth-friendly alternative has led researchers to dig deep and come up with an unlikely solution: fungus. The BBC’s Anna Holligan has this story.

In January, we saw a who's who of tech leaders front and center at President Donald Trump's inauguration.Since, the White House has advocated for the build out of AI infrastructure and put a moratorium on state-level AI regulation. But the Trump administration also added a $100,000 fee to petitions for H-1B visas, which are widely used in the tech sector. To review the year in tech and Trump we called up Suyash Pasi, a research analyst and editor at the nonprofit Human Rights Research Center, who’s been following this shift.

Could AI chat bots replace human doctors? Probably not, but that won’t stop people from trying.Just as they did during the emergence of Google, doctors across the country are grappling with the changing healthcare landscape thanks to artificial intelligence. Today on the show, Dr. Hassan Bencheqroun, a pulmonary and intensive care doctor in San Diego, California, talks about his approach to the intersection of patient care and AI.

Building artificial intelligence tools requires a lot of graphic processing units, and those GPUs need huge amounts of ultra-fast memory to feed them data. Micron Technology is one of a handful of memory chip makers that has been selling a whole lot of memory, thanks to the AI boom.Plus, cloud company Oracle's data center debt is coming under scrutiny. And Merriam-Webster names the word of the year for 2025: slop.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, to learn more on this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

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.