Marketplace Tech-logo

Marketplace Tech

American Public Media

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.

Location:

Los Angeles, CA

Description:

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.

Language:

English

Contact:

261 South Figueroa Street #200 Los Angeles, CA 90012 (213) 621-3500


Episodes

Government pressures tech behind the scenes, says former Facebook employee. It’s called jawboning.

3/28/2024
It’s something government officials on both sides of the aisle are known to do: pressuring tech platforms to bend to their will, aka jawboning. But the line between persuasion and coercion, or even censorship, can get murky. Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments from two states alleging that the Joe Biden administration illegally coerced social media companies into blocking conservative content. Matt Perault, now with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center on Technology Policy, says that in his former job working in policy at Facebook, jawboning happened all the time.

Duration:00:11:26

What a privacy organization and Big Tech’s lead lobbying group think about internet regulation

3/27/2024
When you look at the lawsuits aimed at blocking attempts to regulate tech, it’s usually not companies like Meta or Snap doing the suing. Oftentimes, it’s a group called NetChoice, which has emerged as Big Tech’s top lobbying force from Capitol Hill to the courts. Today, a conversation with NetChoice General Counsel Carl Szabo and Megan Iorio, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit focused on privacy. They occasionally agree, but very often they do not. Case in point: the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which requires websites that children are likely to visit to provide privacy protections by default. It was set to take effect in July, but so far, Szabo’s group has successfully blocked it in court. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali sat down with Szabo and Iorio and asked about how their groups interact.

Duration:00:15:54

Africa’s gaming market is expected to top $1 billion in 2024

3/26/2024
The number of gamers in Africa has doubled in recent years, but many gaming platforms require users to pay for subscriptions or make in-game purchases. That’s a problem for users who don’t have credit cards, but as the BBC’s Mo Allie reports, some fintech companies think they have a solution.

Duration:00:05:34

Why crypto has made a comeback in the Philippines

3/25/2024
Crypto is once again big in the Philippines. It first took off during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2021 with a now-defunct video game called Axie Infinity, where players earned money — often more than minimum wage — through non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Of course, the crypto winter soon followed with the implosion of FTX in 2022, but now crypto is back in a big way on the island nation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with reporter Eli Tan, who recently visited and wrote about the scene for The New York Times.

Duration:00:12:50

Lawsuits, fines and the tech at the heart of it all

3/22/2024
When a company pushes false claims about using artificial intelligence in its business, that’s known informally as “AI washing.” It can feel like everybody’s doing it, but the Securities and Exchange Commission is cracking down on the practice. Plus, is the government’s communication with social media companies persuasion or coercion? The Supreme Court heard arguments this week in yet another case involving online speech. But first, the Department of Justice on Thursday announced that it’s bringing antitrust charges against Apple. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Reuters Breakingviews columnist Anita Ramaswamy about all of these stories for this week’s episode of Marketplace Tech’s Bytes: Week in Review.

Duration:00:11:55

What it means for nations to have “AI sovereignty”

3/21/2024
Imagine that you could walk into one of the world’s great libraries and leave with whatever you wanted — any book, map, photo or historical document — forever. No questions asked. There is an argument that something like that is happening to the digital data of nations. In a lot of places, anyone can come along and scrape the internet for the valuable data that’s the backbone of artificial intelligence. But what if raw data generated in a particular country could be used to benefit not outside interests, but that country and its people? Some nations have started building their own AI infrastructure to that end in a bid to secure their “AI sovereignty.” According to venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, the potential implications and opportunities are huge.

Duration:00:08:40

AI manipulation and the liar’s dividend

3/20/2024
Marketplace’s Lily Jamali and Kimberly Adams discuss how deepfake images are leading people to second guess everything in the latest episode of our “Decoding Democracy” series.

Duration:00:08:28

What Redditors think about the Reddit IPO

3/19/2024
More than two years after Reddit first announced plans to go public, a share offering is expected to hit the stock market this week. The social network boasts 260 million active weekly users and more than 100,000 active communities, according to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Yet in its nearly two-decade history, Reddit has never turned a profit. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Elizabeth Lopatto, senior writer at The Verge, who says not everyone is on board with the company selling stock.

Duration:00:10:39

Makers of electric roasters pitch carbon cutting in coffee making

3/18/2024
Roasting coffee beans was a market worth over $1 billion globally in 2022, according to Grand View Research, which projects that figure could double by 2030. Traditional roasters, powered by the fossil fuel natural gas, still dominate the market. These machines are big and bulky and kind of look like part of a train. But the makers of more compact electric roasters are piling into the business. And they have an edge, touting themselves as high-tech alternatives that are more environmentally friendly and cheaper to run than their old-school counterparts. The BBC’s Frey Lindsay has more on the story.

Duration:00:05:40

TikTok faces the hammer, Sam Altman returns to OpenAI’s board, and Waymo’s driverless taxis come to Los Angeles

3/15/2024
We’re at the end of the week, which means we’re serving up another episode of Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Autonomous vehicle company Waymo has launched its driverless taxi service in Los Angeles. OpenAI has given CEO Sam Altman his board seat back. And a U.S. bill passed by the House of Representatives would force TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, to sell its stake in the U.S. version of the popular social media platform or be banned from app stores. Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, joined Marketplace’s Lily Jamali to discuss why policymakers have been pushing for action on TikTok for years.

Duration:00:15:28

What a TikTok ban would mean for free speech and data privacy

3/14/2024
On Wednesday, members of the House of Representatives proved they can agree on something. In a bipartisan vote, lawmakers passed a bill that would force TikTok to split from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a nationwide ban — the first for a social media app in the U.S. President Biden has signaled he’d sign the bill into law if it passes the Senate. Advocates argue that the Chinese government could use the hugely popular app to collect Americans’ personal data and threaten U.S. security. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, about the congressional action. He pointed out that a little something called the First Amendment could complicate the crackdown.

Duration:00:11:20

The Biden administration hasn’t had a CTO. Why?

3/13/2024
When President Barack Obama took office way back in 2009, he created a new role that promised to bring some tech know-how to his administration. Chief Technology Officer, or CTO, was, of course, a title borrowed from corporate America. Early on, the job focused on things like bringing broadband access to rural parts of the country and modernizing the way the federal government keeps records. President Donald Trump also had a CTO. Well, we are now deep into President Joe Biden’s current term in office and the president has yet to appoint a CTO for the United States. For more on why, Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Cristiano Lima-Strong, tech policy reporter at The Washington Post, who’s been tracking developments on the position.

Duration:00:10:55

States and schools are learning how to manage AI in education

3/12/2024
It’s been about a year and a half since ChatGPT hit the scene and changed the world of education, leaving teachers scrambling to adjust lesson plans and grading policies. Currently, only a handful of states are providing guidance on how AI should be used in the classroom. Just five have official policies, with about a dozen more in the works. Bree Dusseault at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University has been following all this.

Duration:00:09:35

AI can’t handle the truth when it comes to the law

3/11/2024
Almost one in five lawyers are using AI, according to an American Bar Association survey. But there are a growing number of legal horror stories involving tools like ChatGPT, because chatbots have a tendency to make stuff up — such as legal precedents from cases that never happened. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Daniel Ho at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence about the group’s recent study on how frequently three of the most popular language models from ChatGPT, Meta and Google hallucinate when asked to weigh in or assist with legal cases.

Duration:00:09:50

EU fines Apple over competition, Change Healthcare cyberattack drags on, and Max will join the crackdown on password sharing

3/8/2024
Late last month, Change Healthcare, a unit of UnitedHealth, came under attack by an infamous hacker group called BlackCat. $22 million in ransom later, reportedly paid in bitcoin, and the problem is far from solved. Also this week: Max, previously HBO Max, announces a crackdown on password sharing — maybe it’s time to dust off the old DVD player. But first, Apple on Monday got hit with a massive fine from regulators in Europe. They say the company used its app store dominance to box out music streaming services competing with its own. What’s $2 billion to the tech titan of Cupertino? Marketplace’s Lily Jamali asked Chrissy Farr, a health tech investor at OMERS Ventures, for today’s episode of Marketplace Tech Bytes.

Duration:00:12:58

The San Francisco Fed chief says Silicon Valley is thriving, but “in transitional waters”

3/7/2024
More than 260,000 people working in the tech industry were laid off last year, and some CEOs have put at least some of the blame on high interest rates. Policymakers at the Federal Reserve hiked rates at the fastest pace in modern history to beat back inflation. And when rates rise, borrowing money gets more expensive. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali sat down with Mary Daly, president and CEO of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, to discuss how the tech industry is navigating through this higher interest rate world and ask about her agency’s role in the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, one year later.

Duration:00:14:22

One year after “all hell broke loose” at Silicon Valley Bank

3/6/2024
This week marks the first anniversary of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the largest bank failure in the United States since the 2008 financial crisis. Today, Marketplace’s Lily Jamali revisits the SVB collapse with Anat Admati, an economics professor at Stanford University and co-author of the book “The Banker’s New Clothes.”

Duration:00:10:00

Deepfakes and the 2024 election season

3/5/2024
Audio deepfakes have become shockingly convincing in the last few years. A deepfake robocall impersonating President Joe Biden encouraging voters to stay home for the New Hampshire primary was one recent example of how far the technology has advanced. That’s why “Marketplace Tech” is launching a limited series called “Decoding Democracy.” Marketplace’s Lily Jamali will be joined by other Marketplace reporters, experts and researchers to discuss what election mis- and disinformation is out there, how to spot it and how it impacts our democracy. In this first episode of “Decoding Democracy,” Marketplace senior correspondent Kimberly Adams joins Jamali to delve into the latest on audio deepfake technology and how to protect yourself from being fooled by one.

Duration:00:11:22

Spotting tech-driven disinformation isn’t getting easier

3/4/2024
“Misinformation” and “disinformation” are often lumped together. They’re not the same, but they are very much connected. Say you hear that Christmas falls on Dec. 23 this year. If someone told you that thinking it was true, it’s considered misinformation. But when it’s spread with the intent to deceive, that’s disinformation, which can easily be amplified unwittingly by the folks in the first group. Audio and video generated by artificial intelligence is everywhere in this election season. So before you click Share, know that the tech used to create that convincing-but-often-false content is getting a lot better a lot faster than you might think. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with longtime misinformation researcher Joan Donovan, now a journalism professor at Boston University, to learn more.

Duration:00:11:15

A boost for data privacy policy, Nvidia’s chip shortage eases and Apple steers away from electric cars

3/1/2024
It’s Friday, and that means it’s time to dig into some of this week’s tech headlines in “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Good news for Nvidia, the top chipmaker for artificial intelligence applications. There are signs that the company’s product shortage is finally easing up, as more customers nab chips to power their AI ambitions. Plus, Apple reportedly hits the brakes on plans to create its own electric vehicle. But first, there was significant movement on data privacy policy. This week, the Joe Biden administration issued an executive order restricting the sale of Americans’ data to “countries of concern,” according to the White House. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, for her take on these stories.

Duration:00:14:13