In the era of AI, sometimes a story is really just too good to be true, even if the initial evidence suggests otherwise.

And as artificially engineered content becomes mainstream, journalists need to go the extra mile to verify a story’s authenticity.

Casey Newton from Platformer spoke with “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino about his recent wild goose chase that ended in an AI hoax.

Information Apocalypse Now.

AI content is flooding social feeds and its getting increasingly hard to determine what is real versus what is fake.

Aviv Ovadya, founder and CEO of the AI and Democracy Foundation, has been warning of this apocalypse for a decade now. “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ovadya about the state of our information ecosystem and protecting our institutions.

Consumers have heard of “dynamic pricing,” when the prices are based on demand within a single moment. But whether they know it or not, they’re also contending with “surveillance pricing,” where companies use personalized consumer data to serve up personalized prices. Marketplace's Kristin Schwab reports.

In an industry known for pushing the bounds of human innovation, tech elites are now trying to push the bounds of their own bodies. The hot new biohacking trend is injectable peptides — similar to the ones found in GLP-1 medications like Ozempic. But these are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

These gray-market peptides, largely from Chinese manufacturers, are being used by tech workers and founders. Not just to lose weight, but to optimize their health and performance in all manner of ways. “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with independent journalist Jasmine Sun, who recently wrote about this for the New York Times.

Those massive AI data centers going in across the country can use as much energy as an entire city. President Trump said this week he wants tech companies to "pay their own way," and touted a new Microsoft pledge to bear the full cost of their AI energy needs.

Plus, Apple announces its long awaited new AI Siri will be powered by Google.

But first, Nvidia can once again export its second best H200 chips to China if it follows some new security rules and pays the U.S. government 25% of its sales. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, to discuss all these topics on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

When it comes to AI, educators biggest worry: cheating.

With the click of a button, students can form papers, generate test answers or even finish their homework. Leading educators to address its use directly and the expectations for their students.

But Kristi Girdharry, director of the writing center and associate professor at Babson College, has gone a step further. She’s actively integrating AI into her coursework. All in the hopes that her students learn to outwork their robot counterparts.

“I have a mantra going with my students now,” said Girdharry. “I always say, ‘you have to be better than a robot.’”

The pretty Swiss lakeside town of Lugano has set out to become Europe’s bitcoin capital, with the aim of attracting bitcoin companies and the cryptocurrency itself to the city. In Lugano, you can still pay for everything in Swiss francs, but in hundreds of shops and restaurants you can also pay in bitcoin. The city has even started accepting it for municipal services. The BBC’s John Laurenson went to check it out.

Much like graphics processing units, high bandwidth memory is essential for training and running AI. It's paired with all those NVIDIA chips that have been selling like hotcakes and only a small handful companies in the world make it. Now the surge in demand from data centers has created a global shortage for everything else — the PCs and smartphones and other consumer electronics that also use memory chips. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Tom Mainelli, vice president of device and consumer research at IDC, about how long this shortage could last.