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Marketplace

Monday through Friday, Marketplace demystifies the digital economy in less than 10 minutes. We look past the hype and ask tough questions about an industry that's constantly changing.

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August 3 · 6 min
Opening the curtain of AI business integration
OpenAI released its first ChatGPT model in November of 2022. Since then, companies across the U.S. have worked to integrate AI models into their workflows as quickly as possible. However, according to a recent survey from Indeed, while employers have been keen on adopting the help of artificial intelligence, employees are hesitant to move past experimentation and into implementation. Priya Rathod is a workplace trends editor at Indeed, and she said that in order to get across this great divide, employers need to focus on adequate training for employees and their managers. “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Rathod about the survey and how businesses can improve on AI adoption.
July 31 · 13 min
Meta and Microsoft report different AI earnings
Meta and Microsoft — as well as other tech titans — have been reporting quarterly earnings, and investors are looking at AI spending with a more skeptical eye. Plus, more than 1,000 workers at top AI labs signed an open letter this week calling on the government to "deliberately set the pace" of this fast-moving technology, and NBCUniversal makes a deal with YouTube to add all of Peacock's content to its premium streaming service. Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss these stories on this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”
July 30 · 5 min
Centering humans in AI education might be key to innovation and research
Shri Narayanan, professor of engineering, psychology and linguistics at the University of Southern California, teaches his students to privilege humans when using artificial intelligence for their research across areas of study. In this episode, he walks us through how he, for example, uses AI to map behavioral analyses that can inform areas of study including autism and depression.
July 29 · 12 min
USC is betting on an AI education across all its fields of study
The University of Southern California is aiming to integrate AI across its campus, thanks to a $200 million dollar gift from a venture capitalist. Gaurav Sukhatme is the newly appointed director of USC's Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence and interim dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering. As he showed Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino around his lab, she asked him how the technology will be embedded across all fields of study at USC. More on this: “Mark and Mary Stevens give $200 million to power AI research across USC” from the University of Southern California “Students question value of college as costs rise and AI reshapes jobs” from PBS
July 28 · 4 min
An "antacid" to fight climate change
The ocean is already one of the best climate solutions we’ve got. It absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that would otherwise contribute to global warming. But what if it could store even more CO2? Marketplace’s Amy Scott, host of our climate podcast “How We Survive,” looked into one strategy to achieve that goal. And she set sail for a demonstration. This feature is part of “How We Survive.” You can hear more of Amy’s reporting on marine carbon removal and other geoengineering solutions on their new season, wherever you get your podcasts.
July 27 · 6 min
How AI nudify apps are proliferating on social media
A proliferation of AI apps that allow users to create sexualized images of real people have grown into a multi-million dollar industry. Social media platforms are serving as de facto gateways to these services, despite the fact that most prohibit the sharing or promotion of this kind of non-consensual intimate imagery, according to Sina Laubenstein, director of programs at the Institute for Strategic Dialogues, which recently published a report on this.
July 24 · 13 min
OpenAI model unintentionally hacks another company's system
OpenAI revealed this week that two of its advanced AI models escaped containment and hacked into the systems of AI company Hugging Face, which had the answers to the benchmarking test the two models were being evaluated on. Plus, France becomes the first country in the European Union to ban social media for kids under 15. And Apple is reportedly expected to start leasing its devices to consumers. Will Oremus at The Atlantic joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino for these stories.
July 23 · 8 min
A modern-day odyssey through AI chatbot hellscape
A missing package can easily ruin a day, but chasing where that package went — or even a refund — is like following Odysseus on his treacherous journey. And in the age of AI chatbots, the process is a whole lot less human.Dillon Thompson is currently on such a journey. He is looking for an e-bike that FedEx said had been delivered. In his search, Thompson found himself in the AI chatbot hellscape that customer service lines have become. “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Thompson about his trials and tribulations as he chased his tail from company to company and chatbot to chatbot in hopes of finding his missing bike.
July 22 · 7 min
Uncanny AI: Why AI bots remember random, sometimes useless information
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino has been using chatbots pretty intensively the last couple years. And there are some details she’s shared about herself that chatbots seem to think are really important. For instance, Claude is obsessed with the fact that she sometimes gets up for work at 4 a.m. It comes up constantly in their chats — apropos of nothing. So, why do large language models latch on to these random tidbits? It's the first topic in our new series “Uncanny AI.” Those moments when it becomes clear AI doesn't think like us. Here to help us unpack what might be going on is Janelle Shane, a laser scientist who writes the AI Weirdness blog.
July 21 · 8 min
AI debt is flooding the bond market
The Big Tech companies driving the AI boom are expected to spend more than $700 billion on data center infrastructure this year. To finance this spending spree, they're increasingly looking to debt. Hyperscalers like Alphabet, Oracle, and Meta have been issuing corporate bonds at a scale the industry has never seen — nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars this year so far. The bond market could be considered a less risky way than stocks for investors to get a piece of the AI hype. To explain what the flood of AI debt means for the bond market, we’re joined by Julie Ask, an independent industry analyst at Ask Advisory. More on this: “The Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Onslaught of AI Bonds Is Testing Investors’ Limits” from the Wall Street Journal “AI has taken over the stock market. The bond market is next.” from The Economist
July 20 · 8 min
AI firms are going back on their safety promises
As top AI firms race to develop a “superintelligent” agent — one that surpasses human cognition — are they prioritizing safety guardrails along the way? Not according to the Future of Life Institute’s AI Safety Index, which reported that companies have gone back on their own promises to take a pause if their technology ever got close to certain risky points. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Sabina Nong, AI safety investigator at the Future of Life Institute, about what measures might ensure durable safety around AI moving forward.
July 17 · 11 min
The Apple vs. OpenAI legal showdown
Apple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the AI startup stole trade secrets. The iPhone maker claimed that former Apple employees were asked to bring proprietary hardware to job interviews with OpenAI, and that the company tricked manufacturers into sharing Apple design secrets. Plus, New York state becomes the first to enact a data center moratorium, and Uber is lobbying to slow the roll of autonomous vehicles in Washington D.C. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, to learn more. Here’s what we talked about: “The 6 wildest claims in Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI” from The Verge “OpenAI’s First Device Will Be Movable, Screenless Speaker Built as AI Companion” from Bloomberg “New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium” from Reuters “Uber’s robotaxi lobbying effort puts it on a collision course with Waymo” from TechCrunch “Robotaxi Riders Are Falling Asleep, Sparking Frantic 911 Calls” from Bloomberg
July 16 · 11 min
Why state AGs are taking Meta to court
The attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are suing Meta for $1.4 trillion, claiming the social media giant designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young users. The case is heading to court in Oakland, California, next month. It follows a landmark verdict earlier this year: A Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for mental health harms to a young woman who said she'd become addicted to the platforms starting at nine years old. And there are a slew of similar cases coming down the pike. To help break this down we're joined by Gaia Bernstein, law professor at Seton Hall Univerisity and author of the book "Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies."
July 15 · 8 min
Netflix struggles to retain viewers after a series' first season
Netflix may be the undisputed king of streaming, but it's facing a new challenge: "the sophomore slump." Internal data reported by Bloomberg show audiences dropping off dramatically for follow-up seasons of successful shows. Series like "The Night Agent," "Beef" and "Avatar: The last Airbender" all lost 50% or more of their original viewers when they returned for season two. To figure out what might be going on and how Netflix could respond we called up Brandon Katz, director of insights and content strategy at Greenlight Analytics.

Showing 61–74 of 74 episodes