Marketplace Tech

Billions of dollars has been poured into the AI economy in recent years. As part of a new series about what the AI economy means for you, Marketplace Tech is looking at the infrastructure build-out behind the AI boom, starting with a visit to an Amazon Web Service lab in Cupertino, California, where AWS developers are squeezing as much networking efficiency out of their servers as possible for their AI ambitions.

A Micron memory chip factory in upstate New York is wrangling with local groups who want legal assurances the project will benefit the local community. Plus, YouTube plans to crack down on AI slop.

But first, it's shaping up to be a big year for very big initial public offerings. Elon Musk is reportedly preparing to take SpaceX public at an anticipated valuation of around $1.5 trillion. AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI are also expected to follow suit this year.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, to discuss all these topics on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

In the era of AI, sometimes a story is really just too good to be true, even if the initial evidence suggests otherwise.

And as artificially engineered content becomes mainstream, journalists need to go the extra mile to verify a story’s authenticity.

Casey Newton from Platformer spoke with “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino about his recent wild goose chase that ended in an AI hoax.

Information Apocalypse Now.

AI content is flooding social feeds and its getting increasingly hard to determine what is real versus what is fake.

Aviv Ovadya, founder and CEO of the AI and Democracy Foundation, has been warning of this apocalypse for a decade now. “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ovadya about the state of our information ecosystem and protecting our institutions.

Consumers have heard of “dynamic pricing,” when the prices are based on demand within a single moment. But whether they know it or not, they’re also contending with “surveillance pricing,” where companies use personalized consumer data to serve up personalized prices. Marketplace's Kristin Schwab reports.