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From the BBC World Service: The European Union is looking into how Meta handles political content. Now, one of Britain’s top computer scientists has warned that it’s too late to prevent artificial intelligence from being misused to influence voters. Plus, cocoa prices have plunged in the last few weeks. And the electric vehicle industry is struggling right now, but the mood’s been optimistic at this week’s Beijing Auto Show.

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.

With the presidential election less than six months away, election workers are raising concerns about their safety. We’ll get into the rising threats to election offices and how that might affect staffing ahead of November. Also, how Tesla’s disbanding of its Supercharger team could impact the Biden’s administration push to expand electric vehicle use. Plus, how a pest control professional saved a baseball game from a swarm of bees.

Here’s everything we talked about today:


“Nearly Two-Thirds Of Election Officials Worry Politicians Will Interfere With Their Work: Poll” from HuffPost
“Local Election Officials Survey” from the Brennan Center for Justice
“They staffed the Jan. 6 committee. Threats still follow them” from Roll Call
“Musk Undercuts Tesla Chargers That Biden Lauded as ‘a Big Deal’” from Bloomberg
“Pest control ace clears Dodgers-Diamondbacks bee swarm, throws first pitch” from United Press International

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In the latest installment from their trip to Phoenix, “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal and Washington Post columnist Heather Long visit Native Resources — a plant relocation, nursery and landscape company — that sits at the intersection of conservation and development amid a semiconductor boom. Plus, takeaways from the Federal Reserve’s policy-setting meeting, a check-in with business owners about wages and an update on a Mississippi barge business.

Stocks close mixed; Powell says Fed prepared to keep rates unchanged for as long as it needs to; job openings hold steady; manufacturing sector contracts.

Job openings and quits changed little month over month; Fed expected to leave interest rates unchanged in anticipated announcement today; CVS Health quarterly profit halved due to Medicare Advantage costs; Amazon profits soar with more cloud computing, ad revenues.