Marketplace Tech

On this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes,” we’ll dive into President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence plus a request Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made to President-elect Donald Trump. But first, tech news site The Information reported that TikTok plans to completely shut down its app in the U.S. on Sunday and will instead direct users to a website where they can read about the platform’s ban. According to that reporting, TikTok will allow American users to download their data — and, if the ban is overturned down the road, those users will be granted access to it immediately. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories.

California relies on a variety of tools to stop and mitigate wildfires, some as low-tech as dumping giant buckets of seawater on the flames. But on the higher-tech side is a new, AI-powered monitoring system called ALERTCalifornia, which was developed at the University of California, San Diego. It’s designed to speedily detect and report wildfires using a network of over 1,000 cameras and sensors. The developers say the network detected over 1,200 blazes across the state during the 2023 fire season, sometimes with impressive quickness. But the system wasn’t quick enough to prevent the current disaster in Los Angeles. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Cyrus Farivar, a senior writer at Forbes, who explored how the fury of the Palisades fire overwhelmed that human-made system.

California relies on a variety of tools to stop and mitigate wildfires, some as low-tech as dumping giant buckets of seawater on the flames. But on the higher-tech side is a new, AI-powered monitoring system called ALERTCalifornia, which was developed at the University of California, San Diego. It’s designed to speedily detect and report wildfires using a network of over 1,000 cameras and sensors. The developers say the network detected over 1,200 blazes across the state during the 2023 fire season, sometimes with impressive quickness. But the system wasn’t quick enough to prevent the current disaster in Los Angeles. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Cyrus Farivar, a senior writer at Forbes, who explored how the fury of the Palisades fire overwhelmed that human-made system.

As fires burn in Los Angeles, many people are going online to find ways to support people who have been temporarily or permanently displaced by the disaster. But like we’ve seen in the aftermath of recent hurricanes and floods, bad actors are spreading misinformation and financial scams. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at the cybersecurity firm McAfee, to learn more.