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Chocolate's high tech and climate-friendly pivot Nov 10, 2025

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Extreme weather caused by climate change is affecting agriculture and raising the cost of foods like coffee, olive oil and chocolate. Cocoa prices have been hitting record highs due to extreme rainfall, drought and heat. And some experts say most of the land used for cocoa production won’t be usable in the future.

Marketplace’s Amy Scott, host of our podcast "How We Survive," explores a new way tech entrepreneurs are making chocolate so that we can keep enjoying it for years to come.

Bytes: Week in Review - Quantifying AI's impact on job cuts Nov 07, 2025

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On today's “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we discuss federal cybersecurity cutbacks that affected this week’s elections and a caucus of Midwestern states pushing to join the AI boom. Plus, Sens. Josh Hawley and Mark Warner introduced a bipartisan bill requiring some companies to report when AI replaces workers.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios tech policy reporter Maria Curi about these headlines and more.

Former regional Fed president: We need an "AI land grant act" Nov 06, 2025

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Big tech companies have invested hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure, including data centers that are popping up all over the country. Constructing the facilities brings in jobs to local communities, but what happens once the construction is finished? Former Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Pat Harker says tech companies owe a longer-lasting benefit to the communities that host data centers.

Marketplace tech host Nova Safo talked with Pat Harker about his proposal for a “digital AI land grant act.”

Silicon Valley's tech bro culture is changing Nov 05, 2025

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Rya Jetha, tech culture reporter at The San Francisco Standard, spends a lot of time thinking about the industry’s internal dynamics. Gone are the computer programmers, self-proclaimed nerds of an era mostly focused on software development. Jetha says the new tech bro is of the “hard tech” era, with emphasis on the charisma needed to raise huge sums of money for expensive hardware innovations and AI technologies.

Sora 2's disinformation problem Nov 04, 2025

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OpenAI’s latest AI video generator Sora 2 has gotten a lot of attention for its realistic creations. The tool is supposed to have guardrails to prevent creating videos based on misinformation.

But new analysis from watchdog group Newsguard found that, when prompted, Sora 2 often generated videos based on lies, such as false claims having to do with election fraud in a foreign country or that a toddler was detained by immigration agents.

Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Sofia Rubinson, senior editor at Newsguard, to learn more.

Sam Bankman-Fried returns to court to challenge fraud verdict Nov 03, 2025

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Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is serving 25 years in federal prison for fraud. His company collapsed and went bankrupt in 2022. Investigators found that billions of dollars in customer funds had been borrowed without permission to help shore up Bankman-Fried’s other firm, Alameda Research.

But throughout the last three years, Bankman-Fried has maintained his innocence, and he's filed an appeal. A hearing is scheduled for Nov. 4.

Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Jonathan Jones, a reporter and producer for the investigative podcast “Reveal,” who spent hours talking to the former CEO, FTX insiders and customers.

Bytes: Week in Review - Is AI to blame for this week's wave of layoffs? Oct 31, 2025

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Several major firms announced tens of thousands of job layoffs this week, and some reports are putting the blame on AI. Plus, startup Character.AI says it will ban minors from interacting with its chatbots. Also, Nvidia became the first $5 trillion company. We'll look at what that means. Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with regular contributor Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, about all these topics on this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

California's public GPU infrastructure experiment Oct 30, 2025

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Graphics processing units are essential to training and deploying artificial intelligence models, but they don’t come cheap. Big Tech companies like Meta, Microsoft and xAI have spent billions, amassing hundreds of thousands or even millions of them.

For those without such deep pockets, access to this kind of computing power has gotten out of reach. Recently, the state of California launched an initiative called CalCompute to look into building its own public GPU cluster for startups and non-profit researchers to use. There are similar public compute pilots in New York state and at the federal level.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino tells us more.

“China’s H-1B” talent visa gets praise abroad and backlash at home Oct 29, 2025

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Beijing is making it easier for global science and tech talent to visit or do business in China. Chinese officials opened a new K visa for graduates in science, technology, engineering and math to do research and start companies. This comes as the U.S. is cutting research grants and choking H-1B talent visas. Overseas, analysts say America’s loss could be China’s gain. But within China, there is a lot of anger over the K visa. Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak explains from Shanghai.

Wikipedia co-founder: Trust and empathy are essential Oct 28, 2025

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In his new book, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales writes ”in the early years of the internet, we were right to be bullish about people and the technology. Our capacity for social connection, community and cooperation can deliver amazing things. But the very same human nature can deliver atrocities.”

Wales’s says he wrote this book to help combat a crisis of trust in society that is leading to the rise of authoritarianism. Marketplace’s Nova Safo asked him about the main lessons he learned from building Wikipedia into a highly-relied-upon source of information.

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