David Brancaccio

Right here we still find one of the greatest collections of scientific minds, with many working at the frontiers of artificial intelligence.

Recently, a Brookings report identified this waypoint on Route 66 as an AI mini-cluster, but certainly not a superstar AI hub.

Mark Montgomery is a noted AI scientist and entrepreneur based here.

Montgomery is the driving force behind a pioneering company called K-Yield that uses a neurosymbolic flavor of AI very different from the currently popular but often wrong large language models.

Among use cases for his tech is helping to predict and prevent corporate disasters.

Despite all of this and his previous experience as a venture capitalist, Montgomery says he is not expecting a new Mexican NVIDIA or Anthropic to emerge.

On the flip side, New Mexico has taken its cut of burgeoning oil and gas revenues and built a $70 billion sovereign wealth fund to invest in entrepreneurial local companies.

And using fresh data, New Mexico can boast it's now number one in the nation for growth in median or typical family income.

Yet New Mexico also ranks in the bottom three worst in the country for its poverty rate.

This bend in the road on 66 is shaped like a K.

All of my Economy 66 pieces are accumulating at Marketplace.org.

I'm David Brancaccio with the Morning Report from APM American Public Media.

All right.

So I got to find a classic car that I love or maybe owned already.

I don't own a classic car, but I'll have to find one.

I could bring it to you and you could do what with it?

And you're not starting from scratch on the electric motor, right?

Is it like a modular system that could be used in different cars?

All right, now, this statistic I'm mentioning for a reason.

The average cost of private four-year college per year in America is $45,000, okay?