Marketplace Tech

More than 100 rockets took off into orbit from Florida’s Space Coast last year — a new record. And with more rockets taking flight each year, the availability of launch sites is becoming a bottleneck for the growing space industry.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) wants to make it easier for space companies to build new spaceports to make way for the increasing number of rocket launches. The agency has proposed waiving some environmental requirements for space launch. Daniel Ackerman has been reporting on the space industry as part of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.

Suno, an AI music company, wants to partner with independent artists by launching an incubator program called Suno Spark. This program will provide grants, marketing support and, of course, Suno AI tools to unsigned musicians.

Tatiana Cirisano, vice president of music strategy at MIDiA Research, which consults in entertainment, discusses more on this.

Anthropic announced it's adding invisible watermarks to all text generated by its chatbot Claude. The AI startup is rolling out the policy globally as part of efforts to comply with the European Union AI Act.

Plus, there's a patchwork of state laws that regulate AI-generated political messaging — they're being put to the test ahead of the midterm elections. And federal regulators ordered Kalshi to continue to operate in New York, despite a state lawsuit seeking to shut it down.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, about all this for this week’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Generative AI models can produce enormous volumes of text, images and video in seconds. But without expert human instruction, the output is often generic. (You might say slop.)

A number of startups in Silicon Valley are on a mission to change that by giving AI a more human sense of taste.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with critic and journalist Sophie Haigney about what taste is and whether artificial intelligence can truly replicate it.

This story includes discussion of suicide.

Back in 2021, TikTok tweaked its algorithm in an effort to address dangerous filter bubbles — a sort of algorithmic spiral of recommendations for high-risk content like extreme dieting or self-harm. But internal company documents obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek show 10% of U.S. users — 15 million Americans — were purposely excluded from this safety update. This was part of user testing to validate the new feature and track whether it reduced engagement with the famously sticky platform.

One of those users was then-16-year-old Chase Nasca, who subsequently died by suicide. Olivia Carville, Bloomberg Businessweek investigative reporter, has been on the story.