Marketplace Tech

More and more people are turning to chatbots to search the web.

But researchers are finding these systems can be gamed.

We wanted to understand more about how AI chatbot search results can be manipulated, so we called up someone who studies these things for a living: Xiyang Hu, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, where he leads the Generative Learning and Augmented Decision Lab.

More on this

``Someone Hid It!'': Query-Agnostic Black-Box Attacks on LLM-Based Retrieval — a study published for the International Conference on Machine Learning

Reddit comments are 'foundational' to training AI models, COO says — from Business Insider

Language Models Often Favor Their Own Text, Revealing a New Bias in AI — NYU Center for Data Science

You might say the 2026 midterms are the first big AI election. The technology has become a key political issue, it’s a significant source of fundraising and it’s also helping power campaign ads.

Plus, generative AI is being looked to by voters as a tool for sorting through the deluge of information, especially in places like California where there are 14 ballot propositions to research.

Marketplace's senior correspondent for Future Effects, David Brancaccio, put three AI chatbots to the test.

More on this:

“Electoral Hallucinations: Safeguarding UK elections in the world of LLMs and AI chatbots” from Demos

“AI chatbots can effectively sway voters – in either direction” from Cornell Chronicle

It's been a bit of a rocky week in tech markets, particularly for companies heavy on debt. We'll get into it on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Plus, the king of streaming, Netflix, announces plans to cut around 6% of its staff. And on Wall Street, AI skills could be your ticket to a raise.

Here to discuss is Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital.

More on this:

AI borrowing slows as investors grow wary of debt binge — from the Financial Times

Netflix to lay off roughly 1,000 employees, or 6% of workforce — from CNBC

Wall Street firms tie bonuses, promotions to AI skills, survey finds — from Reuters

Check out our YouTube page to watch more episodes of “Tech Bytes.”

Europe may have weeks of paid vacation, quaint walkable cities and incredible, affordable local wines. But there's something the continent lacks (besides ice cubes and AC): shiny, new Big Tech products.

Take Apple's revamped Siri, Meta's Muse or OpenAI's competing AI assistant dots. They've all launched in the U.S., and in some cases other markets. But largely, not in the EU, which has a network of tech regulations targeting data protection, interoperability and AI.

Max von Thun, director of the antitrust think tank Open Markets Institute Europe, explains more on this.

More on this:

“A Continent Without A.I. Agents: Europe Has to Wait for Dots, Muse and Siri AI” — from Trending Topics EU

“Europe’s AI Blues: US Companies Slow Deployment” — from Center for European Policy Analysis

New AI features are quickly rolling out in the apps we use every day — from Google’s AI-generated search summaries to Meta’s Muse agent.

But there's a big gap between what these tools can do and what most consumers find useful. The vast majority use free versions of chatbots, for searching the web, not running swarms of agents to manage their lives.

Kate Moran, a user experience researcher at Gibbons and Moran, joins us to unpack the AI adoption gap.

More on this

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps from Andreessen Horowitz

Not quite mAInstream: A consumer AI profile from Bank of America

Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact from Pew Research Center