Wearables aren't just for tracking steps or monitoring heart rates anymore. In AI-crazed Silicon Valley, a new crop of tech-enabled accessories has taken hold… and they could be listening to everything we say.

Marketplace’s Jennifer Pak recently attended the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. She asked Chinese AI firms what they think about the humans who might lose jobs to their AI products.

Esports is a multi-billion dollar industry, with players making millions by getting good at video games. But while traditional athletes, usually, retire into coaching, managing or being a pundit, what does an esports player do when they’ve hung up their controller? The BBC’s Will Chalk files this report from the U.K.

On today’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review, Perplexity AI has offered $34.5 billion to buy Alphabet's Chrome browser, despite the fact the tech giant hasn't said it's for sale. Plus, the reviews are in for OpenAI's highly anticipated GPT-5 model and they're kinda…mixed. But first, President Trump gave chipmakers Nvidia and AMD the green light to sell their less powerful semiconductors in China, in exchange for a 15% cut of sales revenue. The deal is already raising eyebrows and legal questions.

China’s labor market is known for being intense, especially in the tech sector. For years high profile tech workers have embraced the “996” schedule – that's 9am to 9pm six days a week.

And recently, Silicon Valley startups have reportedly been leaning in to the “996” grind themselves. So now China is taking it up a notch.

Implementing AI in government agencies — where the public goes for things like food stamps and unemployment or disability benefits — could come with tradeoffs, according to a recent report by the Roosevelt Institute. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino sat down with Samantha Shorey, who authored that report on AI and public administration.

In recent years, the Transportation Security Administration has been piloting facial recognition at security checkpoints. But opting out of getting scanned can be complicated, according to a recent report from the non-profit Algorithmic Justice League. Joy Buolamwini is president of the organization and co-authored that report.

U.S.-based data centers are expanding at a fast pace, thanks largely to the boom in generative artificial intelligence software and cloud computing. But they’re also reportedly causing environmental issues and other problems for their neighbors. The BBC’s Michelle Fleury reports from Georgia on how the boom in data centers is raising environmental and sustainability concerns from the people who live near them.

OpenAI’s new open-weight models are designed to run on a local computer and can be fine tuned by users. A Tech Transparency Project report shows Google dropped more than 50 DEI-related groups from its funding list. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the company’s investment to build up its supply chain in the domestically. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, to discuss all of this and more.

Section 1033 of the Dodd Frank Act was finalized at the end of the Biden administration and would require banks to give consumers free access and control of their personal banking data.

The rule had met legal pushback from the bank industry and the CFPB under the Trump administration planned to scrap it. But last week, the bureau said it will instead rewrite Section 1033.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino discusses the news with Rohit Chopra, who served as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when the rule was finalized in 2024.