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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Most of the world’s internet traffic flows through underwater cables on the ocean floor. The wires are also responsible for some $10 trillion worth of financial transactions every day. And because those cables hold so much data and carry so much money, they’re also a potential security threat. That may explain why the U.S. and China are vying for control over the technology — and why the Trump…
Water systems across a dozen states were targeted by cyberattacks in recent weeks. So far, the water has remained safe to drink, but the incidents have raised concerns about the possibility of future attacks. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nikita Shah, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, about other vulnerable infrastructure and the steps that…
More than 100 rockets took off into orbit from Florida’s Space Coast last year — a new record. And with more rockets taking flight each year, the availability of launch sites is becoming a bottleneck for the growing space industry. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) wants to make it easier for space companies to build new spaceports to make way for the increasing number of rocket launches.…
Suno, an AI music company, wants to partner with independent artists by launching an incubator program called Suno Spark. This program will provide grants, marketing support and, of course, Suno AI tools to unsigned musicians. Tatiana Cirisano, vice president of music strategy at MIDiA Research, which consults in entertainment, discusses more on this.
Anthropic announced it's adding invisible watermarks to all text generated by its chatbot Claude. The AI startup is rolling out the policy globally as part of efforts to comply with the European Union AI Act. Plus, there's a patchwork of state laws that regulate AI-generated political messaging — they're being put to the test ahead of the midterm elections. And federal regulators ordered Kalshi to…
Generative AI models can produce enormous volumes of text, images and video in seconds. But without expert human instruction, the output is often generic. (You might say slop.) A number of startups in Silicon Valley are on a mission to change that by giving AI a more human sense of taste. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with critic and journalist Sophie Haigney about what taste is and…
This story includes discussion of suicide. Back in 2021, TikTok tweaked its algorithm in an effort to address dangerous filter bubbles — a sort of algorithmic spiral of recommendations for high-risk content like extreme dieting or self-harm. But internal company documents obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek show 10% of U.S. users — 15 million Americans — were purposely excluded from this safety…
Remember those grainy old baby monitors? So passé. Today, the modern nursery can be equipped with HD cameras and biometric sensors — all analyzed with artificial intelligence. The technology can detect hazardous position changes or a blanket covering a baby's face, but also tracks less critical metrics that purport to help optimize infant sleep and health. Sapna Maheshwari, business reporter at…
Substack, the platform popular for online newsletters, recently launched an artificial intelligence detection feature powered by Pangram. The detector allows users to scan text and get an estimate for how much of it was likely written by AI. But some creators are concerned about the tool’s accuracy and its potential to prompt a “witch hunt” for writers who use AI. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty…
Is your shirt-folding technique good enough to train a robot how to do it? Could MySpace be creeping back into our browsers? We get into all this on today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” But first, the rocket ship/satellite internet/AI company SpaceX reported this week that it spent over $18 billion in capital expenditures in the second quarter. That’s six times what it spent the same…
Let’s say you're chatting away with AI — perfect grammar, great vocabulary. Then, boom: a random word in another language! That's the topic for today's “Uncanny AI.” Those moments where it becomes really clear that AI doesn't think like us. Janelle Shane, who writes the AI Weirdness blog, helps explain why AI chatbots do this. More on this: “ ChatGPT users flummoxed after AI bot starts inserting…
