Marketplace Tech

Meta and Microsoft — as well as other tech titans — have been reporting quarterly earnings, and investors are looking at AI spending with a more skeptical eye. Plus, more than 1,000 workers at top AI labs signed an open letter this week calling on the government to "deliberately set the pace" of this fast-moving technology, and NBCUniversal makes a deal with YouTube to add all of Peacock's content to its premium streaming service.

Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss these stories on this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Shri Narayanan, professor of engineering, psychology and linguistics at the University of Southern California, teaches his students to privilege humans when using artificial intelligence for their research across areas of study. In this episode, he walks us through how he, for example, uses AI to map behavioral analyses that can inform areas of study including autism and depression.

The University of Southern California is aiming to integrate AI across its campus, thanks to a $200 million gift from a venture capitalist. Gaurav Sukhatme is the newly appointed director of USC's Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence. As he showed Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino around his lab, she asked him how the technology will be embedded across all university fields of study.

More on this

“Mark and Mary Stevens give $200 million to power AI research across USC” from the University of Southern California
“Students question value of college as costs rise and AI reshapes jobs” from PBS

The ocean is already one of the best climate solutions we’ve got. It absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that would otherwise contribute to global warming. But what if it could store even more CO2? Marketplace’s Amy Scott, host of our climate podcast “How We Survive,” looked into one strategy to achieve that goal. And she set sail for a demonstration.

This feature is part of “How We Survive.” You can hear more of Amy’s reporting on marine carbon removal and other geoengineering solutions on their new season, wherever you get your podcasts.

A proliferation of AI apps that allow users to create sexualized images of real people have grown into a multi-million dollar industry.

Social media platforms are serving as de facto gateways to these services, despite the fact that most prohibit the sharing or promotion of this kind of non-consensual intimate imagery, according to Sina Laubenstein, director of programs at the Institute for Strategic Dialogues, which recently published a report on this.