Marketplace Tech

The push for electric vehicle adoption got a bit more uncertain with the election of Donald Trump. While reports of “EV death” have been greatly exaggerated, sales growth has slowed, and carmakers have pulled back on aggressive targets. Now, it seems Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino may be part of that trend. She recently spoke with Jack Stewart, a former Marketplace reporter and the man who convinced her to buy an EV, about her decision to trade in her EV for a gas-powered car.

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.

As you may have heard, Marketplace’s Molly Wood has been working on a new podcast called “How We Survive,” about solutions to the climate crisis. The latest episode is called “The Better Battery,” which we need to store renewable energy in our attempts to mitigate global warming. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Molly about how the batteries we have are good and getting better. But a better battery might let us use our cellphones all day without charging or drive an electric vehicle from San Francisco to Los Angeles without stopping.

It’s a big news week for Amazon. First, it got sued by the District of Columbia on antitrust grounds. The lawsuit accuses the company of preventing sellers on its marketplace from offering better prices elsewhere. Then, in another part of its business, Amazon announced that it was acquiring one of the world’s oldest film studios, MGM, which was founded in 1924. So even as big as Amazon is, it just keeps getting bigger, but not in one single market. “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood speaks with Rebecca Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. She said that makes antitrust enforcement tricky and that it reminds her of another old company: Standard Oil.

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There’s been quite a firehose of news this week, but we’re going to distill some of it into a nice, tall glass for you on today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” We’ll dig into why some crypto insiders are upset with President Donald Trump over his preinaugural meme coins. Plus, the latest in the TikTok ban rollback and how Congress might respond. But first, amid the flurry of executive orders the president signed during his first week in office, he announced the Stargate project, a private, multiparty venture to build domestic artificial intelligence data centers. In attendance at the White House were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. The investment could be as much as $500 billion. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, for her take on these stories.