What happens when computers get better at picking up on the vibes?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

It's Friday, and we've got to get down on Friday with the Marketplace TechBites week in review.

Apologies to Rebecca Black for that one.

We'll look at how the tech industry is pushing back against federal cuts to AI and science.

Plus, Waymo is expanding its self-driving services in Silicon Valley.

But first, the e-commerce giant Alibaba released a new AI model this

week called R1 Omni. The company says this AI can read human emotions. Here's a demo that Alibaba shared

on the coding platform GitHub. You know what James? Can you low your voice? You're freaking out,

James. The AI described that character as being, quote, angry and experiencing fear, which

straightforward, but seems accurate.

I spoke about this with Jewelberg Solomon.

She's managing partner at the VC firm Collab Capital and says there are endless possibilities

for how this kind of emotional intelligence can be used.

Particularly this marriage of computer vision with emotional intelligence, I think,

opens up a lot of possibilities along mental health applications, thinking about how to better

sell products to people. So it really does open up the door to a lot of possibilities. And computer vision is just

sort of like where a computer can kind of like read the room essentially, like see things and

understand them. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, traditionally we think about recognition of objects

within a picture or recognition of sentiment, you know, looking at a face. So those are some of the ways that

computer vision applications have been seen in the past. I actually started a computer vision

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