Marketplace Tech

A recent report put out by the tech giant claims its AI model consumes very little electricity and water for a single query. Emma Strubell, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute, says that might not tell the whole story. This episode was produced by Jesús Alvarado.

Borders may be invisible to most shoppers, but for businesses, they often mean delays, extra costs, and reams of paperwork. And amid Trump’s trade war, global trade is now faster and more complex than ever. Those new pressures have sparked a boom in new "customs tech" companies promising to speed things up. The BBC’s Leanna Byrne reports.

Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal, to discuss all these topics and more. This episode was produced by Jesús Alvarado.

It’s challenging for parents to get access to their kids’ data to look out for online harms. In Congress, there's a bipartisan push to change that with a bill called Sammy's Law, named after a teen who died of fentanyl poisoning in 2021. He purchased drugs on social media.

Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer at The Washington Post, who’s been monitoring the bill's progress.

Fifteen years ago, then-CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. His vision was for a lean-back device used mostly to consume content. Now, with the latest iPadOS 26, the device is evolving into something different — and perhaps something more useful. Craig Grannell got early access to iPadOS 26 and wrote about the system's laptop-like qualities in Wired magazine.

A lot of people are eligible to have their criminal records expunged. And there are tens of millions of such files out there for things like misdemeanors, low-level felonies such as drug offenses and even just arrests. LegalEase, a justice-tech startup is streamlining the process through the use of artificial intelligence.

Video gaming can be an expensive hobby. Nintendo’s latest Mario Kart game, Mario Kart World, released in June, costs $80, and it’s widely expected that Grand Theft Audio VI, coming out next year, will top $100. So are games becoming unaffordable … or do gamers not know how good they’ve got it? The BBC’s Will Chalk breaks it down.

The Trump family took their digital token public this week. Plus, artificial intelligence is generating angst in Silicon Valley.

But first, Google’s antitrust case over its search business ended this week with a punishment far short of what the government sought. Google could have been forced to sell off its Chrome browser or stop paying Apple and others to make it the default search engine. Instead, a federal judge said all the company has to do is share some of its search data with rivals.

Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, a reporter at The Information, to discuss all of this and more.

Axon, a company that makes policing equipment, developed new software called Draft One that takes recordings from police cameras and uses artificial intelligence to summarize them into incident reports.

Many police departments trying out the tool are not disclosing that they're using AI to write reports, according to a Mother Jones investigation. That potentially leaves both prosecutors and defense attorneys in the blind — despite safeguards Axon built into its software to prevent this very scenario, and to remove errors or AI hallucinations.

Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with investigative journalist Tekendra Parmar who reported the story for Mother Jones.