The holiday shopping season is here, and AI companies are pushing new chatbot retail partnerships. But, can these tools deliver on their promises to make shopping easier? Plus, the return of Vine, the beloved video app known for its ultra-short absurdist memes.But first, Meta is not a monopoly, according to a federal judge’s ruling this week in the longstanding antitrust case against the social media giant, which claimed Meta had stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, to discuss all of the above on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”
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The difference between Grokipedia and Wikipedia
Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched by Elon Musk's xAI last month, promises to be an ideological alternative to Wikipedia. But the tool doesn't just have a different political flavor, argues Ryan McGrady, senior fellow at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.He recently wrote, for Tech Policy Press, that Grokipedia takes a more top-down approach to knowledge, one that harks back to less democratized eras.
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This school trains the workforce behind China's automated factories
China recently came out with its latest five-year plan for growth, which will guide the world’s second largest economy through 2030. In it, top Communist Party leaders have pushed to boost the country's strength in manufacturing to the next level by upgrading older factories with advanced technologies for automation.The challenge, according to the Chinese ministry of education, is that the sector has tens of millions of open jobs because there aren't enough skilled workers in the labor force to fill them.One school is trying to bridge that gap. Marketplace China correspondent Jennifer Pak visited it in Nanjing city.
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For politicians, what makes a successful TikTok?
One thing almost everyone can agree on about Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York City: he's very good at vertical short-form video.Love it or hate it, the format has a stylistic language all its own. So, we asked Joshua Scacco, professor of communications and director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy at the University of South Florida, to help us dissect what exactly makes a political short form video effective.
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Bridging the uncanny valley of lab-grown meat
About a third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from our food systems, and livestock production is a big part of that. Experts largely agree that one of the biggest actions individuals can take to lower emissions is to eat less meat.But that's a hard sell for a lot of consumers. Americans have actually been eating more meat in recent years, and sales of plant-based meat alternatives have dropped.There are a lot of companies out there trying to innovate climate-friendly meat and alternatives for the future.For our podcast "How We Survive," Marketplace's Amy Scott visits a lab at Columbia University where researchers are figuring out how to make a more convincing and enjoyable fake meat.
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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