Summer internship season is right around the corner. While it’s never been easy to get one of the coveted spots at big-name Silicon Valley firms, this year there’s an added wrinkle: The tech industry is reeling from mass layoffs. Many human resources departments and recruiting budgets have been slashed, which could put up even more barriers for candidates from underrepresented groups, said Ruthe Farmer, founder and CEO of the Last Mile Education Fund, which helps low-income students get through college and get on track for a career in tech. That’s challenging even in the best of times, she told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

Mexico is in the middle of a tech boom as U.S. companies look across the border for hires after mass layoffs. Tijuana is right at the center, with a growing market for tech workers and engineers to be hired stateside.

Artificial intelligence is booming. Tools like ChatGPT are getting more capable at an impressive rate as companies race to plug them into new areas of the economy. But the burgeoning demand for AI computing power faces a big constraint: the graphics processing units, or GPUs, needed to train and deploy these models. These specialized, costly GPUs are almost entirely made by one company — Nvidia — at one manufacturer in Taiwan, according to Chris Miller, a professor of history at Tufts University and author of “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.”

Facial-recognition software is leading to wrongful arrests, but the secrecy around the use of the technology makes it hard to know just how often it happens. So far, there are at least five known cases in which police use of facial-recognition algorithms have led to mistaken-identity arrests in the United States. All five were Black men. Nate Freed Wessler is part of the team representing one of those men in a case against the Detroit Police Department. He’s also a deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology project. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Wessler about facial-recognition technology and why it leads to these outcomes.

It’s the new Googling yourself — querying your name with an artificial intelligence chatbot and seeing what it spits out. Many large language models like ChatGPT and Bard are trained on vast amounts of data from the internet, so they’ve encoded text about individuals, especially public-facing ones. But, as we know, they don’t always stick to the facts, and that’s particularly troubling when it comes to your good name on the internet. That’s why engineer Silver Keskküla founded the website Have I Been Encoded. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Keskküla about why he created the site.

Before ChatGPT took the world by storm, wowing users with its prose-writing prowess, most people knew chatbots as those annoying website pop-ups that offered basic and not always useful customer support. Even before chatbots could pass the Law School Admission Test, customer service was moving toward greater automation, often in an effort to cut costs. Human agents are an expensive and finite resource, causing those long, Muzak-filled waits and limiting service hours. So will the current artificial intelligence boom push humans even further out of the customer support game? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Christina McAllister, a senior analyst at Forrester who works on customer service research and strategy. She says: “Not so fast.”

Snapchat made its name with silly augmented-reality filters, or lenses, as it calls them. In recent years, it’s expanded into shopping, enabling users to try on clothing, jewelry and makeup in the app. The company, now called Snap, has started selling this technology to other businesses. Snap announced this week that it’s pushing AR tools into the real world, bringing AR mirrors to some Men’s Wearhouse and Nike stores in the U.S. ​Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino went to the company’s headquarters in Santa Monica, California, to try the tech out, and spoke with Carolina Arguelles Navas, Snap’s head of AR product strategy, and Brian Cavanaugh, director of project management and business development at Fishermen Labs.

“Prompt engineering” for artificial intelligence is a new career field that’s rapidly gaining interest. In some cases, salaries are reaching $350,000. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Anton Korinek, economics and AI professor at the University of Virginia, about who will need these workers and how this role is likely to evolve.

Ah, Tax Day — a time when our relationship with the United States government can get a little strained, in part because the U.S. system for filing taxes can feel pretty antiquated. But now the Internal Revenue Service has a plan to improve that, thanks to an additional $80 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act that the agency will receive over the next decade. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with ProPublica reporter Paul Kiel about what those IRS technology improvements might look like. Kiel said some of the most effective tech upgrades would be relatively easy to implement.

Back in 2020, California voters approved a measure called Proposition 22 that allows Uber, Lyft and the like to classify their drivers as independent contractors, rather than employees. That means the companies can sidestep laws that would otherwise require them to deliver all sorts of job-related benefits. It’s been a bumpy legal ride, but so far Prop. 22 is prevailing in state courts. Sooo, what’s next for gig workers? “Marketplace Tech” features KQED reporter Rachael Myrow’s update on the situation.