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Early in the pandemic, many big tech companies based in Silicon Valley exited California, fleeing the high overhead necessary to do business there. One city — Austin, Texas — was consistently tagged as the top destination. The Texas capital offered lower costs, especially in regard to housing and taxes. Another draw for companies: the state’s more lax approach to regulation. Well, after a massive influx, the “Texas miracle,” with Austin at its epicenter, is losing some of its luster. In recent weeks, Tesla, which moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin in 2020, announced it’s laying off 2,700 workers there. And software giant Oracle, which relocated to Austin at about the same time, is moving its headquarters again, this time to Nashville, Tennessee. Last week, at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, Marketplace’s Lily Jamali asked Austin Mayor Kirk Watson about the state of tech in his city.

 

On this week’s Tech Bytes: Week in Review, OpenAI has unveiled its own deepfake detection software and is allowing a small group of disinformation researchers to use it. Speaking of artificial intelligence, Apple this week unveiled a new suite of iPads (just in case you forgot they still make those). The company announced its new iPad Pro will, among other features, run on an AI-powered processing chip. But first, a sales slowdown has hit electric car maker Tesla pretty hard of late. Now, the tech news site Electrek reports there’s been another wave of layoffs this week, directly affecting the company’s software, service and engineering departments. It also follows last week’s mass layoff of Tesla’s entire supercharger unit. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist with the Wall Street Journal, to unpack these stories.

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Today’s episode of Marketplace Tech is all about financial scams: how they work, what kinds of technology scammers use, and how to spot a scam before you fall victim to one. We’re passing the microphone to victims of scams to tell their stories and then breaking down how the scammers pulled it off with Marketplace’s Lily Jamali and Selena Larson, staff threat researcher at Proofpoint.

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Pinterest. It’s the platform best known for its viral recipes, fashion forecasts, DIY crafts and ideas for just about any wedding or birthday party theme you could think of. In a sea of outrage and division on social media, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready wants you to think of the platform as a sanctuary of positivity in the online universe. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently sat down with Ready and asked him about how Pinterest has changed since its launch.

Back in the pandemic depths of December 2020, when so many Americans were working, learning and performing essential daily tasks online, the Federal Communications Commission launched an emergency program to help low-income people connect to high-speed internet with a $50-per-month subsidy. That was extended with the Affordable Connectivity Program, which has provided $30 a month for internet service. An estimated 23 million households currently get the subsidy. But they won’t for much longer. Efforts to renew funding for the ACP have stalled in Congress and are expected to run out by the end of the month. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Kelcee Griffis of Tech Brew about her reporting on the ACP and the people who rely on it.

 

The following content may be disturbing to some listeners.

For years, child sexual abuse material was mostly distributed by mail. Authorities used investigative techniques to stem its spread. That got a lot harder when the internet came along. And AI has supercharged the problem.

“Those 750,000 predators that are online at any given time looking to connect with minor[s] … they just need to find a picture of a child and use the AI to generate child sexual abuse materials and superimpose these faces on something that is inappropriate,” says child safety advocate and TikTokker Tiana Sharifi.

The nonprofit Thorn has created new design principles aimed at fighting child sexual abuse. Rebecca Portnoff, the organization’s vice president of data science, says tech companies need to develop better technology to detect AI-generated images and commit not to use this material to train AI models.