Will Gottsegen, a staff writer at The Atlantic, tests out Meta’s AI smart glasses and gives us a recap of how AI continues to get embedded in consumer tech.

Polystyrene is the chemical compound that makes up styrofoam, which is used for packaging and insulation. But it’s not the most environmentally friendly.

By one estimate, 40 million tons of polystyrene were produced globally in 2024, leaving millions of tons of plastic waste. The search for an earth-friendly alternative has led researchers to dig deep and come up with an unlikely solution: fungus. The BBC’s Anna Holligan has this story.

In January, we saw a who's who of tech leaders front and center at President Donald Trump's inauguration.

Since, the White House has advocated for the build out of AI infrastructure and put a moratorium on state-level AI regulation. But the Trump administration also added a $100,000 fee to petitions for H-1B visas, which are widely used in the tech sector.

To review the year in tech and Trump we called up Suyash Pasi, a research analyst and editor at the nonprofit Human Rights Research Center, who’s been following this shift.

Could AI chat bots replace human doctors? Probably not, but that won’t stop people from trying.

Just as they did during the emergence of Google, doctors across the country are grappling with the changing healthcare landscape thanks to artificial intelligence. Today on the show, Dr. Hassan Bencheqroun, a pulmonary and intensive care doctor in San Diego, California, talks about his approach to the intersection of patient care and AI.

Building artificial intelligence tools requires a lot of graphic processing units, and those GPUs need huge amounts of ultra-fast memory to feed them data. Micron Technology is one of a handful of memory chip makers that has been selling a whole lot of memory, thanks to the AI boom.

Plus, cloud company Oracle's data center debt is coming under scrutiny. And Merriam-Webster names the word of the year for 2025: slop.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, to learn more on this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

Search engines, social media, e-commerce, and mobile games all make money by selling advertising. But making ads work in AI search might not be so straight forward. Perplexity, for instance, reportedly pulled back on plans to integrate ads into their AI search engine. And internal documents showed the company made only $20,000 in ad revenue in the fourth quarter last year.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Garrett Johnson, professor of marketing at Boston University to get a sense of why jumping into the ad business is difficult.

A career in tech was once seen as a safe bet — the jobs were plentiful, the pay was ample. But this year the tech sector had another “meh” year for hiring according to the job site Indeed. Tech jobs have been declining now for several years, but this year, the losses at least seemed to stabilize, according to Indeed's latest Jobs & Hiring Trends Report. Still, job postings in the industry remain well below their pre-pandemic baseline.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Indeed senior economist Cory Stahle for a look at how this year turned out for the tech job market.

Tech giants are estimated to have spent almost $400 billion in capital expenditures this year, mostly to build data centers for artificial intelligence. A single massive facility can have a price tag in the billions of dollars.

And many states want in on that spending spree. Thirty-seven states have some sort of incentive program to attract data centers with the hope of bringing a boost to their local economies. They're giving away hundreds of millions in tax exemptions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nicholas Miller, policy associate at NCSL, to learn more.