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...
A veteran of Reagan’s “Star Wars” has doubts about Trump’s “Iron Dome”
Among President Donald Trump’s many executive orders is one calling for a “next-generation missile defense shield.” The White House calls this the Iron Dome for America. The order says it should defend against all sorts of missile attacks and include “space-based interceptors” that could potentially act as both sensors and weapons. It reminded retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Latiff of a Ronald Reagan-era program he worked on: the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, known popularly, and especially to its critics, as “Star Wars.” Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Latiff about whether the U.S. has the technology, money and time to make this grand project work.
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Artificial ingredient: Cooking up new snacks with aid of AI
One of the more hopeful scenarios for how artificial intelligence could affect jobs is that it would take over more of the boring grunt work and free up humans for loftier pursuits. Mondelez, the company behind many of America’s favorite snacks, like Oreo cookies, Sour Patch Kids candy and Ritz crackers, is trying to do just that — using AI to speed up innovation for food scientists and give their taste buds a break. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Wall Street Journal reporter Isabelle Bousquette about how AI is changing the snack game.
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Reimagining the long-term alignment of human and AI advancements
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, has long been the holy grail of innovation — a synthetic intelligence with all the capabilities of a human mind or more. Recent advances in AI have many predicting we could be closer to achieving it than we’re ready for. It’s a reality that preoccupied the late diplomat Henry Kissinger before he died last year at 100 years old. He collaborated with Eric Schmidt, formerly at Google, and Craig Mundie, formerly at Microsoft, on the new book “Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit.” Mundie joined Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss what a future with superintelligence might look like.
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Bytes: Week in Review — DeepSeek, chip tariffs, and an attempt to get kids off social media
Everyone was obsessed with the new white whale of the AI world this week. We’ll get into it on today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, Trump floats tariffs on semiconductors from overseas. And a bipartisan Senate bill to ban kids from social media is getting another look. But first, back to that DeepSeek drama. The Chinese AI company took the world and the markets by storm with claims that its class-leading large language model was built at a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley rivals. DeepSeek claims it spent only $6 million on compute power — at least 16 times less than leading U.S. companies. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these topics for this week’s Tech Bytes.
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Trump renews interest in crypto “meme coins”
President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been seen by many as a boost for cryptocurrency. During the campaign, he made several crypto-friendly pledges and recently made a splash when he launched his own “meme coin” shortly before the inauguration. The Trump token reached a nearly a $15 billion valuation, though it has since fallen quite a bit. But it continues to provoke questions, like, is it a conflict of interest for a high-ranking official? What the heck is a meme coin anyway?Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios reporter Brady Dale, author of the Axios Crypto newsletter, to get some answers.
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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