Marketplace Tech

Mar 25 2025 150 ep. 11 mins 19.2k
Marketplace Tech Podcast artwork

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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AI chatbots mimic human anxiety, study finds

Mar 25 2025 12 mins  
There’s a lot of hope that artificially intelligent chatbots could help provide sorely needed mental health support. Early research suggests humanlike responses from large language models could help fill in gaps in services. But there are risks. A recent study found that prompting ChatGPT with traumatic stories — the type a patient might tell a therapist — can induce an

Workers hope to steer giant Southern EV battery plant toward unionization

Mar 24 2025 6 mins  
The electric vehicle industry in the Southeast is growing rapidly, with increased sales, charging stations and manufacturing. Buoyed by notable victories in the last couple of years, the United Auto Workers union is revving up efforts to organize the EV and battery sector in the South. One target is a sprawling campus in rural Kentucky that, once completed, will be one of the large

Bytes: Week in Review — Nvidia’s new bot, evaluating AI models in health care, and a health tech company preps its IPO

Mar 21 2025 12 mins  
The stock market has been a tad volatile lately. But this month, the digital physical therapy company Hinge Health filed for an initial public offering. Plus, a new tool out of Stanford University evaluates how various AI models perform in real-world health care. It grades them on tasks from patient education to clinical note generation. But first, Nvidia just hosted its annual GTC

More Stanford grads are finding jobs and purpose in defense tech

Mar 20 2025 10 mins  
Stanford University has long been a feeder for the neighboring tech industry with graduates often heading to a brand name of Silicon Valley. But the times, they are a-changin’, according to writer Jasmine Sun. She reported recently for the San Francisco Standard that building tech for the military has become cool on campus. One student, Divya, said her “most effective

Ransomware’s new strategy: naming and shaming victims

Mar 19 2025 11 mins  
Federal officials are warning consumers against a type of cyberattack that’s been on the rise. It’s called Medusa, a ransomware program that uses tactics like phishing to infect a target’s system and encrypt their data, which hackers then threaten to publicly release unless a ransom is paid. Medusa is just one example of how hackers are evolving their strategies

The do’s and don’ts of payment apps

Mar 18 2025 8 mins  
You could say once your company becomes a verb, you’ve arrived. And “Venmo me” is a pretty common phrase these days. Mobile payment apps like Venmo, along with Zelle and Cash App, are becoming pretty widespread, especially among young people. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, consumers under the age of 25 were twice as likely to have used some kind of mobile

Schools are using AI tracking software on student devices, recent investigation shows

Mar 17 2025 15 mins  
Back when the pandemic first hit, many students received tablets or laptops from their schools. Schools also wanted to know what students were doing on those devices, so demand for AI-powered software to monitor students’ digital activities also grew. That surveillance software is the subject of a new investigation from the Associated Press andTthe Seattle Times, whic Claire

Bytes: Week in Review – AI that reads emotions, Waymo expands its services, and the industry pushes back on federal tech cuts

Mar 14 2025 13 mins  
We are taking a look at how the tech industry is pushing back against federal cuts to artificial intelligence and science. Plus, Waymo is expanding its self-driving services in Silicon Valley. But first, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba this week released an AI model called R1-Omni, which the company says can read human emotions. Alibaba shared a demo on the coding platform GitHub

Futurist couldn’t predict our inability to plan for the future

Mar 13 2025 9 mins  
This week, we’ve been exploring the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, we spoke about what might happen with futurist Amy Webb, the CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group. She predicted, among other things, that we would give up more personal data around our health and location. Then on the show in 2021, she said more definitively that privacy was dead. This

The pandemic made teachers learn to love tech

Mar 12 2025 8 mins  
In the spring of 2020, 77% of American public schools moved to online distance learning when the pandemic hit, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education. Prior to the pandemic, you could say that schools were trickling into the digital age. Then, when COVID changed everything, they were basically tossed into it. Some educators adapted quickly, like Bebi Davis, who w