Bobby Allyn
Bobby Allyn is a business reporter at NPR based in San Francisco. He covers technology and how Silicon Valley's largest companies are transforming how we live and reshaping society.
He came to San Francisco from Washington, where he focused on national breaking news and politics. Before that, he covered criminal justice at member station WHYY.
In that role, he focused on major corruption trials, law enforcement, and local criminal justice policy. He helped lead NPR's reporting of Bill Cosby's two criminal trials. He was a guest on Fresh Air after breaking a major story about the nation's first supervised injection site plan in Philadelphia. In between daily stories, he has worked on several investigative projects, including a story that exposed how the federal government was quietly hiring debt collection law firms to target the homes of student borrowers who had defaulted on their loans. Allyn also strayed from his beat to cover Philly parking disputes that divided in the city, the last meal at one of the city's last all-night diners, and a remembrance of the man who wrote the Mister Softee jingle on a xylophone in the basement of his Northeast Philly home.
At other points in life, Allyn has been a staff reporter at Nashville Public Radio and daily newspapers including The Oregonian in Portland and The Tennessean in Nashville. His work has also appeared in BuzzFeed News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A native of Wilkes-Barre, a former mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Allyn is the son of a machinist and a church organist. He's a dedicated bike commuter and long-distance runner. He is a graduate of American University in Washington.
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A computer scientist known as "the godfather of AI" has been warning about the potential dangers of AI. Geoffrey Hinton recently left Google so he could sound the alarm about AI outperforming humans.
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TikTok says Montana does not have the authority to weigh in on national security issues and that the law deprives American TikTok users of their free speech rights. -
Montana has become the first state to completely ban TikTok. Gov. Greg Gianforte has said he is concerned about people's user data being compromised by the Chinese government.
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Social media giants like Facebook redefined how we use the internet. Now many major companies are seeing big changes. What does it mean for news online and what might come next?
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TikTok officials say they are "disappointed in the outcome," but will remain focused on implementing a plan to keep the data of Americans safe.
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Federal officials are attempting to restore public confidence in the banking system after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
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The filter makes users look younger and more glamorous. Some TikTokers are concerned that the tool promotes unrealistic beauty standards. (Story aired on All Things Considered on March 8, 2023.)
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Microsoft is putting restraints on its new AI chatbot after it professed its love to some and berated others. Some experts say the company may have released the bot too quickly.
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When Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy, a vast supply chain in China helped reverse its fortunes. But following pandemic disruptions and tensions between the U.S. and China, that might change.
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Microsoft has announced it will use the AI tool known as ChatGPT in its Bing search engine, and Google has unveiled a competitor to ChatGPT — this could profoundly change how we use technology.
