Bacteria could be the key to a safer, greener way of processing rare-earth metals

The overnight success of ChatGPT helped turn Sam Altman, CEO of its maker, OpenAI, into one of the most powerful people in tech. At a conference hosted by Bloomberg last summer, Altman was asked why we should trust him with so much power, and in response, Altman said, “You shouldn’t.” And yet, throughout his career, Altman has managed to win the trust of Silicon Valley’s kingmakers with ease. In the latest season of Bloomberg’s podcast “Foundering,” journalist Ellen Huet tries to understand Altman’s rise to power. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Huet about what she learned.

Big-budget video game producers and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the union representing voice-over actors and motion-capture stunt workers, have been negotiating a new labor contract since last September. And union leaders say those talks have stalled due to concerns over generative artificial intelligence. (Note: Several Marketplace employees are also represented by SAG-AFTRA under a different contract.) Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Associated Press reporter Sarah Parvini, who recently wrote about the negotiations. She explained how consent is a key concern.

We’ve reached the midyear mark for 2024, so for our weekly review show, “Tech Bytes,” we are breaking format and taking stock of the past six months in tech with Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali asked her what she thought was the most underreported story of the last six months. And what was the biggest flub? We’ll get to those, but we’ll start Curi’s pick for the most impactful story of the first half of the year.

Streaming giants Spotify and SoundCloud were both founded in Stockholm, and over the past two decades the Swedish capital has developed a reputation as a European hub for companies blending music and innovation. So why does this small Nordic city punch above its weight in music tech, and are start-ups still able to thrive there after a rocky few years for the global economy? The BBC’s Maddy Savage reports.

For the millions of residents and visitors who commute in and out of the areas daily, billboards in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area have long been a way to see where the state of tech is at the moment — and where it’s headed next.

Yesterday, we explained San Francisco’s fraught relationship with the tech industry. Tech workers weren’t always welcome in the eyes of many other residents, and when the COVID-19 pandemic began, a lot of them left, taking their dollars with them. But on a recent Thursday evening, organizers of a block party downtown were trying to bring people back. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Manny Yekutiel and Katy Birnbaum about their efforts to revive the city’s downtown.

Cities across the country are still trying to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic changed how and where many of us work, leaving big holes in downtown office districts. San Francisco, once teeming with tech workers, is no exception. But few cities have suffered the sustained reputational damage that San Francisco has. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently visited the city to meet with Heather Knight, The New York Times’ San Francisco bureau chief. Knight, who has been covering the city for more than two decades, offered her take on San Francisco’s image problem, economic situation and tech culture.

In the past week or so, Nvidia’s stock finally encountered the law of gravity — what goes up must eventually come down, at least a little bit. And we look under the hood of artificial intelligence companies that aren’t necessarily making headlines. Plus, the Supreme Court ruled against Republican-led states that accused the federal government of coercing social media companies into suppressing content. But first, major music labels, including Universal, Sony and Warner, are suing two startups that produce AI-generated music. The labels accuse Suno and Udio of using copyrighted works scraped from the internet to train their AI models. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, for her takes on these stories in this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

It feels like eons ago, but during a town hall on violence in America in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton took to MTV to reach the nation’s youth. Clinton’s openness to MTV and what The New York Times called “other unconventional media” had helped pave his path to the White House two years earlier. Fast-forward to today, and even reluctant politicians use TikTok to reach younger voters — President Joe Biden is no exception. His first post came just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl. We invited Marketplace’s senior Washington correspondent, Kimberly Adams, and Joshua Scacco, professor of political communication and director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy at the University of South Florida, to discuss the evolution of political messaging with Marketplace’s Lily Jamali. Scacco said Clinton’s MTV moment informed how future presidents, including his successor, George W. Bush, have engaged with Americans.

This week, we’ve been taking stock of how tech has both helped and harmed Americans trying to get abortions in the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. After the Dobbs decision, some experts warned consumers that menstrual tracking apps would provide a means of surveilling abortion seekers. There was even a social media campaign on what was then Twitter advising people to delete their period trackers. But it’s turned out that the threat to privacy isn’t limited to those apps. Other digital data can actually be more likely to reveal an illegal abortion. That’s according to Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. He told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that everyday consumer apps generate sensitive data that can be used for abortion surveillance.

Tom Frazier is the co-founder and CEO of Redivider, a company that is making sustainable & responsible edge computing. But first, what is edge computing? You might not realize it, but every single device you use and every single platform you interact with is storing massive amounts of data somewhere. And the farther away from you physically these data centers are the more inefficient and unsustainable they become. Edge computing is the idea that we should keep the source of our data closer to where we're physically located, which is no easy task. In theory, this could help us be more sustainable, more efficient, and more secure in a world where our data is floating around everywhere, and can easily fall into the wrong hands. Now this is one of those subjects that is extremely timely, especially as we march headfirst into a future that is entirely digital. Redivider builds modular, smaller facilities, and diverse locations which enables faster data processing and increased to capacity, and they're also focused on improving sustainability, because their modular solutions are hydrogen powered. This episode falls into the category of something that humanity desperately needs, but we don't necessarily know we do yet, and that's why I'm so excited to share this conversation with you today.

➡️ https://www.redivider.co/

➡️ https://rosspalmer.com/tom-frazier

➡️ Follow me on Instagram: @therosspalmer

➡️ Subscribe on YouTube: @therosspalmer

We're on spring break this week. We'll be back on Thursday with our regular show.

To get you through the next few days, we’re offering up an earlier episode of Watt It Takes about the origin story of Greentech Media.

In this edition of Watt It Takes, Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch interviews GTM Co-Founder Scott Clavenna about the beginning of the company, the challenges of being a startup in the cleantech world, and our recent acquisition by Wood Mackenzie. 

Watt It Takes is a live interview series produced by Powerhouse in partnership with GTM. The conversation was recorded live in Oakland, California.

Don't forget to subscribe to our other GTM podcast, The Interchange.

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