Marketplace Tech

In order to write her new book “I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI To Do ‘Almost’ Everything," journalist Joanna Stern decided to invite artificial intelligence into every aspect of her life — including her family life.

She has a wife and two sons. On their spring break, she took them to Phoenix, where it's easy to hail a driverless car. They rode in a bunch of them, including one that totally freaked out.

She brought home an AI-powered toy (which her four-year-old quickly tired of), and says she realized her kids will "grow up never knowing a world without computers as smart as them.”

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Stern about how she hopes her children will navigate that world.

Imagine if you invited robots - smart ones or “smart-ish,” at least - into every aspect of your life. Your emails and texts are all composed by an AI, the bots look at a photo of what’s in your fridge and figure out what you can make for dinner. They even become emotional support, providing advice and sometimes companionship. Journalist and founder of media company New Things, Joanna Stern, decided to try this and she wrote about it in her new book “I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI To Do Almost Everything.” Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Stern about how AI did and didn’t help her and ultimately what she sacrificed by inviting AI into her life.

There's a new flex in Silicon Valley: how big is your AI agent swarm? They can work on your behalf, autonomously, 24/7, on whatever goal you give them. You might think having an army of AI minions could free up some time, maybe make work more chill. But, you’d be wrong, as Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino reports.

On this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we’ll discuss why Apple is paying a $250 million settlement over its Apple Intelligence tool and its capabilities. Plus, GameStop makes a surprising buyout offer for eBay. But first up: Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, announced a new computing deal this week with SpaceX and its AI division, xAI. Anthropic will get access to SpaceX’s Colossus One data center, which will let the company increase how much its customers can use Claude. The deal comes as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is facing off in federal court against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke about all this with Caroline O’Donovan, AI and technology senior reporter at The San Francisco Standard, who noted that Anthropic's leaders talked about the need for more computing power at their developer conference this week.

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

Back in 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman got the idea to start a nonprofit AI lab to develop artificial general intelligence that benefits all humanity. The lab would also make its technology open source, calling it OpenAI.

All that is according to a complaint filed by Elon Musk, who has since parted ways with the organization. And now he is suing OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman and its president Greg Brockman, saying they have abandoned the founding principles of the organization in pursuit of profits.

They are currently facing off in federal court in the Northern District of California. Paresh Dave at Wired has been in the courtroom. He explains more on what the core of Musk's case is.