Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

This week: Startups are taking longer to go public or sell to a buyer. What does that say about the state of tech? Also, the dating app Bumble once courted women by letting them make the first move. We’ll explain why Gen Z is prompting Bumble to change things up. But first, discount retail giant Walmart announced this week it is shutting down its telehealth business, as well as its network of low-cost health clinics. There were 51 of those clinics scattered across five states throughout the country. They were part of Walmart’s big push into health care, announced in 2019. So what happened? Marketplace’s Lily Jamali is joined by Christina Farr, author of the health tech newsletter Second Opinion, for her take on this week’s tech news.

Just how capable is today’s artificial intelligence at beating humans at their own games? That’s one of the metrics tracked by an annual report put together by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, or HAI. And its latest AI Index report finds the tech is quickly gaining on humans. According to the report, AI now exceeds human capability not only in areas like simple reading comprehension and image classification, but also in domains that start to approach human logic, like natural language inference (the ability to draw inferences from text) or visual reasoning (the ability to deduce physical relationships between visual objects). Still, there are areas where the bots haven’t quite caught up. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nestor Maslej, research manager at HAI and editor in chief of the index report, to learn more.

In October, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft, beginning a deep-space mission to one of Jupiter’s moons to determine if it’s capable of supporting life. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the Clipper was built, to learn more about the mission and see the spacecraft before its shipped off to Cape Canaveral, Florida, later this month.

A massive general election is currently underway in India. It’s been described as the “largest democratic exercise in history.” And tech platforms are a big part of it. Many Indian voters get their information online, where misinformation and disinformation can spread quickly. That includes deepfakes of prominent public figures, like Bollywood actor Aamir Khan, spreading false information about who or which political parties they are endorsing. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific policy director and senior international counsel with the international human rights group Access Now, about how deepfakes and online misinformation have become a problem for voters in India. They also discuss a recent report from Access Now and Global Witness, an environmental and human rights nonprofit, about YouTube’s advertisement moderation standards in India.

Robotics company Boston Dynamics announced this month it is retiring its humanoid robot known as “Atlas.” The 6′, 2,330 lb robot was considered a quantum leap in robotics and was famous for parkour stunts and awkward dance moves. Debuting more than a decade ago in 2013, the Atlas robot was a part of a partnership with the Defense Department. It relied on hydraulic power, using pressurized fluid to generate movement. It could do tasks that can be challenging for humans like lifting heavy boxes and parkour. As the older Atlas lives out its golden years, Boston Dynamics has announced its successor – a smaller version of the Atlas bot that runs on electric power. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Brian Heater, hardware editor at TechCrunch, for his take on what’s next and a look back on the original Atlas.

The noncompete clause is dead! American tech workers are poised to benefit from the Federal Trade Commission’s new crackdown on the agreements, which prevent a company’s ex-employees from working for its rivals for a specified time. Also, Tesla’s profits crashed 55%. As electric vehicle sales sputter, we wonder why more players are still speeding into the space. But first, TikTok’s top executive was defiant after the passage of a massive foreign aid package that included a directive to the company: Sell to a U.S. buyer or get banned. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali is joined by Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, for his take on this week’s tech news.

When Jeff Bezos left Wall Street to start Amazon in 1994, the most common question he got was “What’s the internet?” Fast-forward to today, and Amazon is, of course, the country’s leading online retailer, as well as cloud services provider. In 2022, the company controlled almost 38% of the U.S. e-commerce market. Walmart, its closest competitor, had just over 6%, according to Insider Intelligence. In her new book, “The Everything War,” The Wall Street Journal’s Dana Mattioli documents the tactics she says have enabled Amazon to dominate.

Imagine you’re a national security official tasked with monitoring activity off the coast of your fictitious country. Suddenly, a large tanker ship in your area goes silent. Its location sensor is offline, and it’s not responding to radio communication. What do you do? It’s a question Francesca de Rosa, chief scientist for gaming at the Center for Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response Simulation, poses in the Reliability Game, which she designed. It’s part of a genre known as “serious games.” De Rosa told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that while serious games can be fun, they’re really meant to prepare people to handle all kinds of situations.

A new wearable from tech startup Humane promises to bring an AI assistant to your lapel. It attaches to your jacket, sweater or shirt and operates with voice commands or a digital interface laser projected onto the palm of your hand. It sounds like the stuff of a sci-fi novel, but the reviews so far are not good. The panning of the Ai Pin comes after five years in development, $240 million in funding and partnerships struck with the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft and Salesforce. So, what went wrong? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino asked Victoria Song, senior reviewer at The Verge, what this device is supposed to be for.

Artificial intelligence has become a big part of medicine — reading images, formulating treatment plans and developing drugs. But a recent investigation by Stat News found that some insurers overrely on an algorithm to make coverage decisions for seniors on Medicare Advantage, a Medicare plan offered by private insurers. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Casey Ross, who co-reported the story. He said an algorithm predicted how long patients needed care and coverage was curtailed to fit that calculation.