Marketplace Tech

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.

Technology has been transformative for how police officers do their jobs. Body cameras, speed detection technology and surveillance drones are some prominent examples.

And now, law enforcement departments are trying to figure out if and how they want to add artificial intelligence to the mix.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Greg Barber, a science and technology journalist who recently wrote about this for Proof News. He explained how AI is being used in police work now and whether or not AI has become a time-saving tool for officers.

The startup Winnie is a marketplace for childcare. It works like this: Parents type in the age of their kid and their zip code, then different childcare providers in the area will pop up. You can also filter by languages spoken, and whether you want a childcare center or home-based daycare or another option. It's free for parents to use.

But the company was founded back in 2016, when AI search wasn’t really a thing. And Winnie’s CEO and co-founder Sara Mauskopf says parents now want to be able to describe what they're looking for in natural language. So, Winnie has had to adapt. It's just released an AI-powered search tool.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Mauskopf to learn more about their new AI search engine and the challenges of keeping up with the fast-paced AI sector.