Marketplace Tech

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.

Meta launches its own, dedicated AI app that could go head to head with the likes of ChatGPT. Plus, a massive data leak put California Blue Shield members' most sensitive medical details at risk. And how is the health tech investment sector navigating all the recent economic uncertainty from the Trump Administration’s latest trade war? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino and Christina Farr, managing director at Manatt Health, explore all these topics on this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

When President Jimmy Carter died late last year, the foundation that runs Wikipedia noticed something unusual: the flood of interest in the late president created a content bottleneck, slowing load times for about an hour. Wikipedia is built to handle spikes in traffic like this, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, but it's also dealing with a surge of bots scraping the site to train AI models, and clogging up its servers in the process, the organization’s chief product and technology officer Selena Deckelmann told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

Canada's liberal party and its leader Mark Carney are set to remain in control after the country held federal elections Monday. They were the first since Canada adopted the Online News Act in 2023, which requires online content providers — like social media platforms — to negotiate some sort of "fair" payment to news publishers in exchange for using their content. They can also do what Meta did — block news from their Facebook and Instagram platforms altogether. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Marketplace Senior Washington Correspondent Kimberly Adams, who’s been reporting on the election from Canada, to learn more about that law and what happened to the online news environment after it passed.

One of the most powerful tools in the fight against climate change is the money sitting in investment portfolios - especially the trillions of dollars invested on behalf of public retirees. That’s money that could continue to fund fossil fuel development, or help pay for climate solutions instead. New York City has implemented an ambitious Net Zero plan for its public pensions. That plan includes divesting from some fossil fuel companies and investing billions of dollars in climate solutions. One company benefiting from that investment is NineDot Energy. Wedged between an elementary school and a big box shopping center in the Northeast Bronx, NineDot Energy is operating a battery farm that the city’s utility company, Con Ed, can call on to help relieve the grid when it gets overstressed. “The batteries hold a combined three megawatts of battery storage. That’s enough to power about 3,000 New York City households for four hours on a hot summer day. Last summer, the battery farm was called half a dozen times, which was enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a combined 24 metric tons. That’s the equivalent of nine thousand car trips on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Currently, the city has the dirtiest energy grid in the state. More than 90% of its power comes from fossil fuels. NineDot Energy is still in growth mode, but battery farms like this could eventually help the grid transition to renewable sources, like wind and solar. “The sun only shines when nature tells it to; the wind only blows when nature tells it to, but people use electricity when they decide to,” explained Adam Cohen, co-founder of NineDot Energy. “A battery helps mediate that process. It pulls in the extra power when it's available, and then puts it back out when people call for it.” On a recent visit to the Bronx facility, 12-year-old Virtue Onoja showed off a mural she helped paint along with other students from the elementary school across the street, envisioning a future powered by cleaner energy. “One thing about me, I'm definitely an artist,” she said. “I drew a clear blue sky, no pollution, no nothing [and] beautiful yellow flowers and the sun.” There are also drawings of windmills and electric school buses. “There's still a lot of pollution, not just in the Bronx, but just in New York in general,” Onoja said. “All of this is the goal that we want to achieve.” This is an excerpt from the latest season of How We Survive. Listen to the full episode here.

Leyla Isik, a professor of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University, is also a senior scientist on a new study looking at how good AI is at reading social cues. She and her research team took short videos of people doing things — two people chatting, two babies on a playmat, two people doing a synchronized skate routine — and showed them to human participants. After, they were asked them questions like, are these two communicating with each other? Are they communicating? Is it a positive or negative interaction? Then, they showed the same videos to over 350 open source AI models. (Which is a lot, though it didn't include all the latest and greatest ones out there.) Isik found that the AI models were a lot worse than humans at understanding what was going on. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes visited Isik at her lab in Johns Hopkins to discuss the findings.

It's the last Friday in April and it's time for Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review. This week, we'll talk about how the Federal Trade Commission is suing Uber over its subscription service. Plus, how the VC world is navigating the uncertainty created by the trade war. But first, a nonprofit pivot is facing some challenges. Open AI, the maker of ChatGPT was founded about a decade ago as a nonprofit research lab. It's now looking to restructure as a for-profit — specifically, a public benefit corporation But that transformation is facing resistance. About 10 former Open AI employees, along with several Nobel laureates and other experts, have written an open letter asking regulators in California and Delaware to block the change. They argue that nonprofit control is crucial to Open AI's mission, which is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, about how unusual it is to see this kind of conversion. YouTube Video of Marketplace Tech Bytes More on everything we talked about An Open Letter - Not For Private Gain Ex-OpenAI workers ask California and Delaware AGs to block for-profit conversion of ChatGPT maker - from the Associated Press OpenAI’s Latest Funding Round Comes With a $20 Billion Catch - from the Wall Street Journal FTC Takes Action Against Uber for Deceptive Billing and Cancellation Practices - from the Federal Trade Commission FTC sues Uber over difficulty of canceling subscriptions, “false” claims - from ArsTechnica White House Considers Slashing China Tariffs to De-Escalate Trade War - from the Wall Street Journal VC manufacturing deals were already declining before tariffs entered the picture - from Pitchbook

TikTok is going to be testing a new crowd-sourced fact-checking system called Footnotes. It’s seems similar to the Community Notes systems already in use on other social media, such as X and Facebook. TikTok is also keeping its current fact-checking systems in place. The way these community systems generally work is, say someone makes a post stating "whales are the biggest fish out there." Another user could add a note saying "actually, whales are mammals, and here's a source with more information." Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Vanderbilt psychology professor Lisa Fazio about why this model of "citizen fact-checking" is catching on.

The use of algorithmic software in setting residential rents has come under scrutiny in recent years. In 2024, the Joe Biden administration sued real estate company RealPage, alleging that its algorithm, which aggregates and analyzes private data on the housing market, enables landlords to collude in pricing and stifles competition. There's no word yet on what the second Donald Trump administration's Justice Department will do with this case. But in the meantime, some cities are banning the use of these algorithms completely. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Robbie Sequeira, who has been reporting on the issue for Stateline.

We've sometimes wished we could have our own Wendy Rhodes, the performance coach at the hedge fund on the TV show “Billions.” Most workplaces, however, aren't bringing in billions and can't afford a Wendy. But an upskilling platform called Multiverse uses artificial intelligence to provide personalized, on-the-job guidance. Its AI coach, Atlas, helps workers expand their abilities and keep themselves relevant in an economy that makes skills obsolete faster than ever before, says Ujjwal Singh, chief product and technology officer at Multiverse.

Developers of mobile apps have "room for improvement" in making their platforms fully accessible for disabled users, according to a new report from the software company ArcTouch and the digital research platform Fable. It looked at fifty popular apps and assessed them for features that improve accessibility like screen reading, text size adjustability, voice controls and multiple screen orientations. The apps were tested by disabled users who reported a poor or failing experience almost three-quarters of the time. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ben Ogilvie, head of accessibility at ArcTouch, to learn more about why so many apps are behind.

NVIDIA gets caught up in the trade war, the titans of Twitter/X debate intellectual property law — and the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case against Meta kicks off in court. We're digging into all of it on today's Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, about what we learned in week one of Meta's monopoly trial.

Flying cars have been a staple of science-fiction visions of the future for ages. Perhaps most famously in “Back to the Future II.” The film may have overshot the mark a bit with Doc and Marty McFly navigating full-on air highways in 2015. But Utah is pushing for the technology to take off by 2034, when the state hosts the Olympic and paralympic winter games. We're not exactly talking about flying Delorians or vehicles you'd recognize as a car, but rather small, lightweight aircraft for traveling shorter distances. Reporter Caroline Ballard got a first look at the air taxis.

China is responsible for most of the world’s processing of rare earth metals and minerals, but its new export restrictions have raised the stakes for U.S. efforts to build its own supply chain and processing industry. Barbara Arnold, a professor of mining engineering at Penn State, says there are options, but they require time, development and investment.

Surveillance technology like automated license plate readers has become commonplace in policing. They've made it easier to locate stolen vehicles and track suspects, but they've also raised concerns about civil liberties. Cardinal News Executive Editor Jeff Schwaner took a 300-mile drive through the state to see how often his car would be recorded. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Schwaner about his experience and issues related to privacy and who has access to the data.

One area where artificial intelligence has been swiftly adopted is software coding. Google even boasted last year that more than a quarter of its code was generated by AI. But the technology is also generating challenges to the traditional technical job interview, where candidates are given programming problems as a way to assess their skills. And lately it’s become apparent that a lot of applicants are using AI to give themselves a boost, according to recent reporting from Business Insider's Amanda Hoover. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Hoover about the controversy over applicants using AI while interviewing for jobs that often use AI.

The tariff rollercoaster has created a lot of uncertainty in the tech industry. We're digging into how its playing out for makers of consumer tech, e-commerce platforms and AI. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these topics for this week’s Tech Bytes.