There’s been something of a critical mass of high-profile departures and retirement announcements at Apple in recent weeks. Plus, how will consumers be helped or hurt by a potential merger between Netflix and Warner Bros or a hostile takeover from Paramount? And McDonald's pulls an AI-generated Christmas ad because some folks on social media weren't “lovin' it.”

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal for this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

The AI boom is propelling a once-obscure group of state regulators into key decision-making roles for the economy. AI needs data centers, data centers need power and power is generally regulated in some way — depending on the state — by public utilities commissions.

That's the topic of a new report from the Center on Technology Policy at NYU. Scott Brennen, CTP director and author of the report, said these commissions often make decisions on planning and permitting for new infrastructure and decide the rates utilities charge consumers.

The extended Black Friday sale season means a lot of people have been buying new TVs. The top sets today can display in up to 8K Ultra High Definition, they have deeper blacks, brighter highlights and are thinner and lighter-weight than ever. And yet, modern TVs have their haters — a dedicated group of purists who find them lacking, and would rather hunt down a good old fashioned used plasma.

Prosthetic limbs can be expensive, costing thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. So the industry seemed ripe for disruption when 3D printing came along. The technology requires little labor and uses economical materials. But the reality of 3D printing prosthetic limbs isn’t that straightforward, according to writer and University of California, Berkeley, lecturer Britt Young, who uses a prosthetic arm.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Young about why 3D printing has yet to bring down prosthesis costs.

A new report from Stanford and Common Sense Media finds that more than half of U.S. teens use AI chatbots for companionship. But, according to Dr. Darja Djordjevic, an adolescent and adult psychiatrist who co-authored the research, the bots aren't equipped to provide the kind of emotional support young people need when dealing with a mental health issue.

Dr. Djordjevic and her team simulated conversations involving various mental health concerns with four of the most popular consumer chatbots and identified several risks; chiefly, their tendency to be sycophantic. A note, this conversation mentions suicide and self-harm.

The Trump administration has been trying for months to ban AI regulations at the state level. And its latest gambit to roll such a measure into the congressional National Defense Authorization Act appears to have failed. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Tuesday that GOP leadership is now “looking at other places” to include that measure after reportedly facing pushback from both parties.

Plus, New York recently became the first state to enforce an AI law designed to protect consumers from "algorithmic pricing." And Amazon pulled back on AI dubbing for some international content after anime fans complained.

Every day, consumers are confronted with the fragility of our personal data privacy — another data breach, another government agency accessing databases they didn't previously have access to, another consent form popping up to get permission to gather more data.

It's almost too much for any one person to keep a handle on, according to Rohan Grover, professor of artificial intelligence and media at American University. He recently co-authored a piece for The Conversation about why data privacy seems to have largely fallen out of the public discourse, even though he says the topic is more urgent than ever.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once speculated that we'll soon see the first billion-dollar company run by one person and an army of AI agents. Journalist Evan Ratliff decided to put the idea to the test in the newest season of his podcast, “Shell Game,” where Ratliff and his team of synthetic co-founders, executives and workers launched their startup, HurumoAI. His AI agents designed a logo, built a website and eventually released their own agentic AI service.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ratliff about what he learned from this whole experience.