Everyone was obsessed with the new white whale of the AI world this week. We’ll get into it on today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, Trump floats tariffs on semiconductors from overseas. And a bipartisan Senate bill to ban kids from social media is getting another look. But first, back to that DeepSeek drama. The Chinese AI company took the world and the markets by storm with claims that its class-leading large language model was built at a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley rivals. DeepSeek claims it spent only $6 million on compute power — at least 16 times less than leading U.S. companies. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these topics for this week’s Tech Bytes.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been seen by many as a boost for cryptocurrency. During the campaign, he made several crypto-friendly pledges and recently made a splash when he launched his own “meme coin” shortly before the inauguration.

The Trump token reached a nearly a $15 billion valuation, though it has since fallen quite a bit. But it continues to provoke questions, like, is creating this investment vehicle a conflict of interest for a high-ranking official? And what the heck is a meme coin anyway?

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Axios reporter Brady Dale, author of the Axios Crypto newsletter, to get some answers.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Brady Dale: They’re a speculative instrument that, I sort of view them as a game. You know, there are these cryptocurrencies that capture an idea. So the most famous one is dogecoin — that funny dog that everyone sees all over the internet — and then, you know, these days there’s this blockchain called Solana that’s very fast and easy to use and cheap to use. And this app was spun up called pump.fun that made it very easy to just create new meme coins, like super, superfast. And so thousands get created every day. And it’s just a game where people, you know, watch the new ones come out and ask themselves, which of these ideas is the funniest, which of these ideas is the catchiest? And they buy some, you know, making a bet that they can pick it correctly. And then, you know, these coins typically don’t last very long. Sometimes they do, but typically they don’t. And so you’re trying to, like, guess which ones will grab everyone’s attention. If it does start to go up, you try to sell at the right time because you sort of assume it’s not going to last forever. So it’s this big, massive gambling game that people are playing together because right now, in crypto there’s nothing else really interesting to do other than buying bitcoin, because bitcoin has had a good year or so, but that’s not that exciting. And so people are looking for, you know, people in this space like fun stuff to play around with. And so that’s been meme coins for the last many months.

Meghan McCarty Carino: All right, and we’re discussing this now, of course, because of President Trump’s meme coin, which he launched the weekend before the inauguration. How did that go?

Dale: Well, it really exploded. At first, a handful of people made a ton of money off of it. A bunch of other people made a little, tiny amount of money off of it. And, you know, some others lost money. It’s way down from its high price. But one thing I will say is this meme coin would fall into the category of what we sometimes call celebrity meme coins. And there’s been a lot of celebrity crypto products. Those have the potential to have more staying power because, like the celebrity — in this case, the most powerful man in the world — can, if they choose, do things around those coins to, like, keep driving interest to them. He could start saying that, like, there’s a special section at my rallies for, you know, Trumpcoin holders. Who knows if he’ll do that? He may never talk about it again. It may be a totally dead thing, but if he did, that kind of thing would continue to drive interest in it.

McCarty Carino: Yeah. Tell me more about these celebrity coins because there have been a number of them and a number of kind of scandals around them in the last year or so.

Dale: Yeah, generally speaking, when celebrities get involved in cryptocurrency, it doesn’t go well, you know? It’s been mostly something that kind of C-list or has-been celebrities have done, you know, honestly. And so it’s tough for them to drive ongoing interest, since people don’t have ongoing interest in them. But obviously, you know, no one is able to drive ongoing interest like President Trump. So this coin could be different. I’m not banking on it, but it could be different.

McCarty Carino: I mean, you did report that a lot of the people buying the Trump meme coin were largely new to crypto.

Dale: Yeah, because I think, you know, the app that they used at launch, called Moonshot, said it onboarded 400,000 people, and you know, probably most of them were people who had never touched a blockchain before. I think a lot of people saw it and assumed it was Trump and so probably the price would go up quickly and think maybe they could make some money. But I think some people thought it gave legitimacy to the sector. I mean, here is the [then] about-to-be president, now the president, launching a cryptocurrency, so maybe that actually meant something. Now, the weird thing is, it’s hard to see how much this actually came from Trump himself. You know, he was asked about it by some reporters, and he said he didn’t know much about it, which, you know, who knows if that’s true or not? But what is true is, I think when it launched, a lot of us were expecting him to promote it in some way during his inauguration time, and he didn’t say anything about it. He still hasn’t, you know. So there’s been something that [Trump’s son] Barron did that he wasn’t paying much attention to, which is unclear.

McCarty Carino: So how has the crypto industry been responding to these official presidential meme coins?

Dale: Yeah, I would say the people who’ve been around for a long time, the more sober crypto people, you know, those folks do exist, haven’t been that excited about it because they feel like the president launching a cryptocurrency undermines his kind of, you know, authority and his credibility as someone to move pro-crypto regulation. So they haven’t been that psyched about it, but that the newer folks, like, for example, I talked to one of the co-founders of pump.fun, you know, the guys who got the whole meme coin thing going in the last year. They’re extremely excited about this, you know? Like, obviously, it’s been great for them and their sector. It’s been great for the blockchain they build on, Solana, but I think by and large, the energy from Trumpcoin has kind of died off. We haven’t seen them putting more into it. So I think folks are largely disappointed and sort of not feeling great about this happening. But it also, the president is so powerful right now, it probably isn’t really going to mean much, one way or the other, for the industry, really, in the grand scheme of things.

McCarty Carino: And what can investors do with these coins?

Dale: Bet that they’ll go up or down? I mean, that’s, that’s all. That’s the only function they have so far. You know, the Trump Organization could introduce more functions for them, but right now, it’s purely speculative. Now this might be of interest to your listeners. This is hardly the first Trump meme coin. There’s been a ton of Trump meme coins. It’s just that this is the first official Trump meme coin. And the reason that’s important is there were lots of Trump meme coins trading during the election. There were also Biden coins, there was Kamala coins, there was, you know, RFK coins, like whatever, you name it. But these were just things that people made, some as more serious efforts than others. But what is interesting about those coins is they did go up and down with, like, the polls and the news and the election. So if Trump looked like he was doing better than Biden, the Trumpcoins would go up in value. When [then-Vice President Kamala Harris] first became clear that she was going to be the Democratic nominee, her meme coin really shot up in price, like a ton, you know. Went from like, next to nothing to, you know, something. You could have made a lot of money if you’d had some of those. So they really do follow the news. That is how folks trade them. So, I mean, it could be that people will buy into these things and sort of, you know, make bets around moves that Trump makes, and what that might do to his price, the price of his coin and probably, if what we saw in the election is true, this coin will follow big news moments in his presidency.

On the crypto regulation front, Trump has already created a group focused on, among other things, the creation of a national cryptocurrency reserve, which could come from crypto seized by the federal government.

Meanwhile, Trump Media — the parent company of Truth Social, also majority owned by the president — recently announced it was planning to offer its own financial services, specifically investments like exchange-traded funds and, yes, cryptocurrencies.

Back to that question of what you can do with a Trump meme coin: Several e-commerce sites have announced they will accept it as a form of payment. So you can now buy Trump watches, Trump sneakers and Trump fragrances with Trumpcoin.

Amid all the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump during his first week in office came a promise to “restore freedom of speech” and end federal censorship. Keen observers may note that freedom of speech is protected by the Constitution.

But the order seems to have something more specific in mind. It calls out what it characterizes as the Biden administration’s pressure campaign on social media companies to “moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech under the guise of combatting misinformation.”

Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer at The Washington Post, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that the order is a signal of the president’s continued focus on content moderation online. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation:

Will Oremus: What [Trump is] doing, though, is equating censorship with online content moderation and rules around what people can say online. And in particular, he uses the executive order to assert that the Biden administration abused its power when it talked with tech companies, or potentially pressured tech companies, to take down certain types of misinformation, conspiracy theories, mostly stuff around COVID-19 and the vaccines, and some around January 6 and the 2020 election.

Meghan McCarty Carino: And this is kind of a practice that has come to be called jawboning.

Oremus: That’s right. So jawboning is an older term, but it refers to when someone in government uses their position of authority to try to influence the decisions of private companies. It’s not a legal term, there’s no law against jawboning, but when you’re jawboning private companies around their decisions about speech, that could be a form of censorship by proxy, depending on how it’s done. However, when the government is telling social media companies, or if the government were telling social media companies, what their speech policies should be, then that could be deemed government censorship. And so that was at issue in a case that came to the Supreme Court last year called Missouri vs. Biden. And so Trump is going back to that and saying, that was, in fact, censorship and we’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore — even though the Supreme Court actually did not say that it was censorship.

McCarty Carino: This Trump order calls for investigating the actions of the federal government during the Biden administration, to look for free speech violations. I mean, does this mean that they’re going to be relitigating that case?

Oremus: I think it does. Now, when you’re a government official, you have a right to free speech as well. Joe Biden can say, “I think it’s bad that there is a lot of COVID vaccine misinformation on Facebook or on Twitter,” that’s within his right. The question is, did he pressure the companies to change their actions? Did he threaten them? Did it rise to the level of coercion? The Supreme Court hasn’t found that so far. But [that case is] now back in a lower court in Louisiana. And here’s the funny thing, because Biden is no longer the president, Trump is now the defendant in that case. So the case is now, in fact, called Missouri vs. Trump, and so the Trump administration will probably take a very different approach. It may not even try to defend the Biden administration’s actions in that case. So we’ll have to see how that case gets resolved at the lower level.

McCarty Carino: Many free speech advocates have been very troubled by the actions of the Biden administration — and also, I would say, Republicans who have also engaged in this kind of activity in the past. Does this Trump order please folks like that, that are concerned about government influence on social media companies?

Oremus: Yeah, it’s a good question. So even First Amendment advocates who were troubled by the Biden administration’s contacts with social media companies are not buying necessarily Trump as the defender of free speech and the true enemy of jawboning. Trump himself has engaged in plenty of jawboning. In his first term, he did it when he got upset by his own tweets being fact checked on Twitter (this was pre-Elon Musk), and within days he had come out with an executive order saying “we should look at Section 230.” A lot of First Amendment advocates say that seemed like it might have crossed the line into illegal censorship by Trump. So this executive order, one scholar told me, it feels like an attempt to rewrite history, and to say that when Biden did it, it was illegal censorship, and we’re going to investigate that, and we’re not going to tolerate that, but it doesn’t mention at all Trump’s own attempts to influence tech companies, which are almost certain to continue, and in some ways, already are continuing at the beginning of his second term.

McCarty Carino: Let’s talk a bit more about the potential effects of this order on content moderation more broadly. What might this mean for the online information ecosystem for users on social media?

Oremus: The upshot of all this for social media users is that they’re going to find across most of the major platforms, fewer restrictions on what they can say, and they might also find themselves subjected to more slurs or harassment or discrimination and find that they don’t have as much recourse in successfully reporting those posts as they used to. In general, we will see Meta’s platforms and maybe other platforms moving more in the direction of X under Elon Musk, and because Trump has made it so clear that he does not want to see social media companies moderating content. And we’ve seen from his first term that getting on Trump’s bad side just creates a succession of headaches for tech companies.

McCarty Carino: And it seems like even before Trump took office, we saw a number of organizations, social media platforms, moving in that direction already.

Oremus: So there’s been this years long Republican-led push to equate content moderation with censorship. It has had an impact already on the landscape across social media and also nonprofits and academia. We’ve seen universities disband groups that were researching misinformation because those groups were getting subpoenaed by Republicans in Congress, and they were getting labeled as censors, and they were drawing criticism and harassment and all that sort of thing. And some universities just decided, well, we’re better off without this. And so misinformation research has declined as a field. And more recently, we’ve seen Mark Zuckerberg and Meta pull back on content moderation. Mark Zuckerberg has gone back to saying that Facebook and Instagram and Threads should air on the side of free speech, and this is very much in keeping with this Trump led and Republican led push to stop moderating what people say online.

McCarty Carino: We’ve already seen recent efforts targeting this NewsGuard, which rates online publications with these nonpartisan transparency nutrition labels for consumers, but also geared at advertisers who might want to have more details about sites that potentially host their advertising. What’s been going on there?

Oremus: Yeah, so we wrote about NewsGuard last month as an interesting window into some of the effects that this campaign against not only content moderation, but also against fact checking. You know, a lot of conservatives these days equate fact-checking with a liberal project to suppress conservative views. And so this company NewsGuard was actually founded in an explicitly nonpartisan way, and they set out these objective criteria by which they rate the credibility of news sites. But they’ve been cast as part of this censorship cartel. And so Brendan Carr, who is an FCC commissioner, who is now the chair of the FCC under Trump, wrote a letter seeming to threaten tech companies that work with NewsGuard, that use NewsGuard’s ratings in their algorithms or to help with their search results. One example is if you have Microsoft Edge as your browser, you can actually turn on NewsGuard’s ratings and see them every time a publisher comes up in your search results. Carr said, hey, working with a group like NewsGuard really makes you guys look like sensors, and just keep in mind we can always take another look at Section 230 and your liability shield if we find that you’re not moderating in good faith, and working with NewsGuard would be an example of not moderating in good faith. So NewsGuard is now under threat almost entirely from the right. I mean, when it started out, it got criticism from both sides, but now it has become sort of demonized on the right, and it’s fighting for its own reputation as a nonpartisan source for credibility ratings.

There’s no shortage of bullish voices on artificial intelligence among the titans of tech. But even many of the leading evangelists, in addition to prevailing pop culture narratives, tend to strike a note of impending doom when envisioning the future of the technology. Reid Hoffman wants us to consider the alternative. He’s the co-founder of LinkedIn, and a founding investor and former board member of OpenAI before he branched into other ventures, like Inflection AI. And his new book “Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future?” explores those alternatives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Hoffman about what he means by the idea of “superagency.”

Last week’s annual gathering of the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was a bit overshadowed by the inauguration of Donald Trump in the U.S. The president made a virtual appearance at the conference, delivering a speech that hit on several of his recurring themes: tariffs, inflation and artificial intelligence. AI has been a big topic at the summit for several years. But the way it was treated this year felt different, according to Reed Albergotti, tech editor at news website Semafor. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino caught up with Albergotti just as he was wrapping up his reporting at Davos.

There’s been quite a firehose of news this week, but we’re going to distill some of it into a nice, tall glass for you on today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” We’ll dig into why some crypto insiders are upset with President Donald Trump over his preinaugural meme coins. Plus, the latest in the TikTok ban rollback and how Congress might respond. But first, amid the flurry of executive orders the president signed during his first week in office, he announced the Stargate project, a private, multiparty venture to build domestic artificial intelligence data centers. In attendance at the White House were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. The investment could be as much as $500 billion. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, for her take on these stories.