500 orders a month was manageable. 5000 is madness! Embrace intelligent order fulfilment with ShipStation. The only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Go to ShipStation.com and use code START to try ShipStation free for 60 days. AI companies are having to self-edit what they put out in the world. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Stephanie Hughes. It's Friday, time for Marketplace Tech Bites. This week, a Wisconsin city votes to restrict future data center development. Plus, the astronauts on Artemis II take their journey to social media. But first, Anthropic announced this week it has a new AI model called Claude Mithos Preview. The company says it's extremely good at finding security vulnerabilities. So good that Anthropic is not releasing the model to the general public. Instead, it's granting access to a group of over 40 companies and tech organizations, including Google, JP Morgan Chase and Cisco. This collaboration is called Project Glasswing. I talked about it with Joanna Stern, founder of the media company New Things. This is really great on one hand, that they are able to find exploits and vulnerabilities that have been around forever that they never would have found before. On the other hand, terrifying and bad because now AI could just use those exploits to hack us all. And so this is significantly powerful and so powerful that Anthropic has said, hey, we don't want to release this to the public yet. We're only going to release it to people we think that will do good with it to protect our operating systems and protect the public. And OpenAI has even said that they're going to do the same with one of their next models. This is going to be sort of a thing that starts to happen in the AI industry where the models don't go out immediately to the public. They go to these kind of security researchers. They go to specific companies to test them before they go out to patch things like this. Yeah. Years ago, I produced an interview with the sci-fi author William Gibson where he said that he's come up with some ideas that he's put into his manuscripts and then taken out because he didn't want the ideas to proliferate. And this move from Anthropic kind of reminded me of that in a way. And it made me wonder, how often do you think AI companies are going to need to self-edit in the future? We're seeing it right now. We're seeing it across the board with other things that they're working on, right? Things that Anthropic has said, we do not want to put this in the hands as we saw with the DOJ. We do not want to have permissions around using our technology for mass surveillance. We don't want to have our technology used for creating weapons of mass destruction. And so the question is going to be more around policy and safeguards that we as humans put in place than the progress of this kind of technology, which is a very scary place to be. It makes me wonder if this could hurt revenue for these companies, but also kind of be good marketing at the same time? Yeah. It's like, it's a great marketing that you're made the most powerful AI that can bring down computer systems all over the world. Doesn't everyone want that model? Yay. You could end to the markets, but yeah, you have money while you're doing it. There is a whole cybersecurity industry of extremely talented humans who are good at spotting vulnerabilities. How do you think this new model and others like it could affect how that industry functions? I think it's similar to what we're seeing in other industries, especially around coding right now, where humans are managing AI agents. They are doing some of the work, but most of their work is telling AI what to do. I think we're going to see a very similar thing in cybersecurity. We've seen it in coding. We've started to see it in customer service. I think that's this new way of working that's going to hit most industries. Yeah. Let's move to our next story. A Wisconsin city votes for a measure that could restrict future data center development. This week in Port Washington, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, residents voted for a measure that said certain large tax incentives for developers have to get voter approval before moving forward. That could derail future big data center development in the area. The city already has a big data center project in the works. That's not going to be affected. Politico is calling this quote, the nation's first anti data center referendum. How likely do you think we are, Joanna, to see similar restrictions from voters in the future? I think we're seeing this across the country and even here where I live in New Jersey on a much more smaller scale of them. What's happening in Wisconsin. I saw, we saw in a town here, the voters sort of rising up and saying, we do not want a data center built in our backyards. And the government saying, okay, we're going to fight this company that wants to put this up. Now it wasn't even a massive AI data center, but you see this happening. You see this happening at the ground level. I think this is a really interesting one because it's not only about not having this built, but also seeing the incentives that could go to voters and to the community. So it's hopefully more of a realistic version of what might happen here. Why do you think this is happening now particularly? I think just the publicity and the PR of what we've seen happening around data centers and the impact that what can happen to the environment, what can happen to the power grid. We've seen lots of stories over this over the last two years, whether it's about the power supply and costs going up of the actual power, whether it's about the water and the concerns about the water that these big chips and these big systems inside these data centers need to cool. And then there can be costs, whether it be taxes or others, types of costs, which I just talked about, to the people that live in these areas. And so it seems very fair that if you live in one of these areas, you're going to say, yeah, what are we doing about this? It seems like tech companies are spending all the dollars they have, borrowing billions more to build these data centers. And it makes me wonder if pushback from regular Americans could keep that development from happening and what that would mean for these companies putting everything in to data centers. I still think we're going to end up with ways that we're going to see data centers taking over certain parts of this country. I think what we hear from both the companies and the government right now is that we need these big centers of compute to push along the U.S. to be competitive, to beat every other country, whether it be China or Europe or Russia around the data or the AI infrastructure. And so if this is what we believe that we need this giant, massive centers of compute, it has to come from these data centers to get these big models to improve everything we need. And we're going to just ultimately end up with these. And again, it's how is the public, how are our elected officials going to structure that so it does not have massive impact on the financial and social and cultural lives of Americans? We'll be right back. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. We're back with Joanna Stern, founder of the media company New Things. So let's get to our final story. Artemis II sets the record for flying the farthest in space. So this week four astronauts aboard the Artemis II test flight around the moon set the record for going farther than any other humans ever have about 250,000 miles from Earth. The astronauts said they hoped the record is not long-lived. And the mission has gotten a lot of attention. And NASA's also made it really accessible. There's a YouTube channel that provides continuous coverage of it. I actually tuned into it earlier this week. Here is an edited excerpt of what I heard. We added the pictures from NASA. The crew is getting ready to wake up and kick off flight day eight of the mission. We'll continue to stand by for that wake up call. This is Mission Control Houston. And you know, when I had this on the background, it was kind of really nice. Like I was just living my regular work life, you know, here. And it sort of felt like I was there with the astronauts. And it made me wonder, Joanna, what do you think this kind of access does for NASA? I mean, I think it's been amazing, right? You have people of all ages tuning in. I was on the YouTube channel last night and it's like millions of followers of just the account. And I didn't even like take it into account the actual like people that are watching the stream. And the streams from for some of the time is super boring. And it was like, just the outside. And it's just like, I think there's a couple million people watching at that point, right? They're leaving it on in the background. And there's been a few other viral moments. I mean, in the tech world, I don't know, you might ask about this, but, you know, the photos the astronauts have been taking using their iPhones from the windows that are just amazing. And, you know, kind of the play on, well, we were going to get, we were supposed to have these space zoom lenses where we could like take pictures from Earth of the moon, but yet the best pictures to come from the iPhone ever of the moon are, of course, of astronauts pointing their cameras outside the window at the moon. So, yeah, I mean, look, I think it's been amazing. It's really nice to see. You know, the astronauts themselves, like as you mentioned, also seem really good at social media. You know, there's all these funny videos. There's one where they did it to the full house theme song, kind of introducing each of the members of the crew. I'm just gonna say TGAF for the win. This made me wonder, Joanna, you know, how important is it for astronauts not just to be good at their jobs, but also kind of sell the job to the American public? I mean, I think now more than ever where they're, you know, look, we are lucky right now we have a renewed interest in our space programs. We have independent companies, private now going to space, trying to really think about what is the future of space exploration looking like. But for so long, we have not had that, right? It's not been, you know, since like the 1970s where there's been this mass public interest in watching both the innovation in spacecraft, but also the innovation in like what we're seeing from these astronauts, right? In telling us about the experience, describing. There was just like a really nice moment with one of the astronauts, too, was describing what he was seeing. And again, reminded me of early space programs and hearing from these astronauts, but now with social media, now that they can make that message go and there can be these viral moments, whether they're doing funny things or they're, you know, I saw one too, like, get your to your point, like they're passing around the tiny microphone and it's like floating and it's still like it's amazing. I wish we know we knew if like NASA like was like, okay, you know, on their checklist of of can you go if you're the right astronaut for this job for this space flight like social media proficiency if that was like, you know, number two or three on the list, I doubt it was number one, you know, that's Joanna Stern at the media company, new things. You can find the full video of this episode of marketplace tech bites we can review on our YouTube channel, marketplace, a P.M. Check it out every Friday if you like Nancy Fargolly is our executive producer, Gary O'Keefe is our engineer. He says as a kid, he definitely wanted to be an astronaut. He's a solverado produced this episode. He says being an astronaut never occurred to him. He wanted to work in a restaurant. Daniel Shin also produces our show. His dream job as a child was a paleontologist firmly rooted on the earth. Daisy Palacios is a supervising producer. She says she had no interest in being an astronaut as a kid. There's enough to occupy her here on this planet. I'm Stephanie Hughes going to space always kind of scared me still does but I like hearing about it. That's marketplace tech. This is a p.m. What happens when your kid's childhood becomes your business? I'm Rima Grace and this week on This is Uncomfortable, we step inside the world of family influencers where childhood turns into content and content turns into income. What does it do to the kids at the center of it all? And what does it reveal about modern motherhood? I think part of the reason that mom influencers and family vloggers are so popular in the United States specifically is because American motherhood is so lonely. Be sure to listen to This is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.
