Marketplace Tech

This week, Palantir announced on X it’s relocating its headquarters to Miami. Plus, we look at the controversy around Ring's Search Party feature.

But first, an update to Google's AI search summaries. If you use AI-enabled search on Google, it’ll spit out an AI-generated summary with source links to the right. Now, the company is making links more prominent when users hover over certain words in the AI summary.

Google says this new interface is “more engaging.” Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, about all this and more.

Meta anticipates up to $135 billion worth of capital expenditures this year, nearly double the company’s outlay in 2025. One driver of that expenditure growth is what Meta calls its "Superintelligence Labs." This kind of spending puts it right up there with other tech giants pouring money into their AI capabilities. And it's a shift from a company that used to be hyper-focused on virtual reality. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talked about this with Mike Isaac, a reporter for the New York Times, to learn more.

As artificial intelligence companies roll out more sophisticated agents, many analysts and investors raised concerns that AI could replace traditional software. Some are dubbing this the “SaaSpocolypse.”

New AI tools allow users to “vibe code,” or describe what you’d like to create in plain language and have the AI generate the code for you. This could make some software easier for companies to create themselves.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, a technology research firm, to learn more.

According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the number of students enrolling in computer and information science decreased this past fall from the year before. That's at both the graduate and undergraduate level and the first drop since 2020. Meanwhile, the Computing Research Association says there's been a decline in a number of computing-related majors. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Kari George, Senior Research Associate at the CRA's Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline to learn more.

Caterpillar, which manufactures heavy duty equipment like asphalt pavers, diesel engine locomotives, and industrial gas turbines, has been around for 101 years. And now, the company seems to be one of the big winners of the AI infrastructure build out.

Big tech companies are working as fast as possible to get their data centers up to power artificial intelligence. Some are building their own natural gas plants to provide electricity for those data centers. Enter Caterpillar, maker of electric generators. Marketplace’s Dan Ackerman has been reporting on this.