Let's tour the growing AI economy

Programming supported by Minnesota Carlson and their first Tuesday speaker series at the University of Minnesota, featuring candid conversations with some of the biggest names in business. More at z.umn.edu/firsttuesday. This podcast is supported by Odoo. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple efficient software promotes growth. Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable. And some describe Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more as building blocks for creating a custom software suite. So Odoo is fertilizer, magic beanstalk building blocks for business. Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Okay. So they call it artificial intelligence, but the AI economy is very, very real. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdell. It is Tuesday today, January twenty seventh. Good as always to have you along, everybody. We're gonna spend the program today recapping a quick trip I took a couple of weeks ago. Morning, everybody. Hey, Kai. How are we? Morning. Welcome to the Bay Area. Thank you very much. That's Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino. You hear her here, and you hear her on Marketplace Tech. She was my ride at the airport up in San Jose. Tell me why I'm here. Well Maybe get on a plane at, like, 08:00 this morning. You wanna talk AI, you wanna talk AI and money, gotta come to the Bay Area. Alright. Right? Fair enough. We started our series the other day trying to figure out whether AI is getting too big to fail because there is massive spending happening, massive borrowing too to finance the data center boom. I went to one in LA. Megan talked to people about their not so good feelings about our AI future and the trade offs that come with it. But the thing is, the AI future is already happening in Silicon Valley. There's a lot going on here. There's data centers. There's energy. I I wanna back up for a minute. What does it what does it feel like here AI wise? I mean, all all the rest of us hear about AI is, oh my god. Data centers and power and water and, you know, all those things. Chat GPT and blah blah blah. What does it feel like here in Silicon Valley? My answer might be a little counterintuitive. I mean, it's definitely, like, on everyone's, you know, the tip of everyone's tongue. You see it everywhere you go. The billboards are everywhere. We passed a couple of those billboards literally just outside the airport for both biggies like Google Gemini and for smaller companies neither Megan nor I had ever heard of. In terms of, like, the boom on the ground Yeah. I grew up here. I've been through a lot of these cycles. And So so sorry. So let's back up. You grew up here, which I did not know. I probably …