This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 17th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you important context and help each other understand for goodness sake. Today, Andy Beach is making sense of the Super Bowl ad fight and 3D print stuff in seconds. Ooh, I want to 3D print stuff in seconds. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Sarah Lane. But first, we need to start with what you need to know with the big story about RAM. The high demand for RAM caused by massive data center buildouts continues to have knock-on effects. Valve posted a notice on the Steam Deck page that the Steam Deck OLED may be out of stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages. And the OLED's the only one they're making. The LCD version is still available, but it's no longer in production. So once they're out, they're out. In Bloomberg's story checking in on Ramageddon, lots of little tidbits. Tesla's Elon Musk has said the company may build its own memory fabrication plants for chips. Of course, Elon says a lot of things, but that's what he's saying. Tim Cook, who is usually more understated, warned stockholders that profit margins for the iPhone will be compressed. uh sources are telling bloomberg that sony is considering pushing back its next playstation to 2028 or even 2029 because of the shortages nintendo apparently again sources saying might raise the price of the switch to this year samsung is reviewing memory supply contracts on a quarterly basis instead of a yearly basis to adjust to the fast changing landscape and phone makers Xiaomi, Oppo, and Transhin, which makes the Techno brand, are lowering their shipping targets for the year. TrendForce estimates that demand for high bandwidth memory, or HBM, will increase 70% this year and crowd out the fabrication plant capacity for other kinds of RAM. HBM is going to take up 23% of DRAM wafer output, which is up from 19% last year. So it's not like they won't be able to make other kinds of RAM. They just won't make as much. GF Securities estimates that there is a 4% gap between supply and demand for DRAM. Hence, everybody's trying as fast as they can to build a bunch of factories. Micron is spending $200 billion to expand or build new plants. They've got them underway in Boise, where they're going to double the size of their existing plant. There's plans in Syracuse, New York, in Hiroshima, Japan. SK Hynex, a Korean company, is building new fabs both in South Korea and in India. And those new plants are going to start output in 2027 at the earliest. So when everybody says this shortage is going to continue this year, that's probably why. We're not going to get a lot of capacity anytime soon. In fact, I found this Financial Times story, Sarah, where an activist investor is now lobbying Toto, the toilet maker in Japan, to shift its emphasis from making toilets to making electrostatic chucks. These are something that's made since the 80s using its knowledge of ceramics. Is that RAM? Well, it's used in building NAND flash memory. But they're saying like, yeah, you're going to make a lot more on building parts for NAND flash memory than you are on making toilets, Toto. I mean, OK, so we all know that, you know, there's there's a huge build out going on for data centers right now. We've talked about this ad nauseum. And to make those data centers work properly, you need RAM. And now there's a shortage of RAM that, you know, companies like Tesla and Apple and Sony and Nintendo and Samsung and others are all experiencing right now. And, you know, I'm not a data center expert because, you know, I've never built one myself. But, you know, to make the next data center to help the data center that's supposed to help us buy that next PlayStation, I mean, it all feels very chaotic. Yeah, it is. I think this is one of those situations where sometimes I see the headlines and I'm like, you are making it sound more chaotic than it is. I don't think we are in this particular case. I don't think anyone really knows what's going to happen with the RAM market over the next year, other than it's going to get more expensive. Nobody knows exactly how much. Apple's got enough cash in the bank to hold the line on its prices, but a lot of companies won't be able to. That's why Nintendo's looking at a possible price rise. They'll resist it if they can, because they know it'll reduce sales if they raise the price, but they're going to have to do that. Meanwhile, RAM makers are looking at a windfall of profits because they can charge pretty much whatever they want uh because yeah it's like someone's gonna be like we'll take yeah all the ram you have exactly we'll take it yeah i mean apple's a good example of you know a company where it's like yeah they can they can roll the dice on this for a little bit but not forever no um and like you mentioned other companies can't do that at all and uh yeah it'll be interesting to see where where we're at in, let's say, six months from now. Because it does seem, you know, it's a crunch. It's a crisis. And I wonder if someone will come up with an innovative solution, right? This is what the tech industry is supposed to do best, is figure out different ways to do things. Come on, deep thinkers. Yeah. Yeah. Make it happen. Well, we will continue to follow the story, of course. But we will also continue to thank everybody who follows us on DTNS. DTNS is made possible by all of you listening and some of you watching right now. Thanks to John Atwood, Pat, and Mike Cortez. We also have new patrons, Paresh, Joe, Dodge, Tyler, Graham, Liam, Chris, Michael, and Beach Sam. Hey, Beach Sam. Hey. Yeah. Yeah, holiday weekend in the US means lots of new patrons and some of you coming in at a very high end with your new patrons. So thank you. And we really appreciate that. There's more we need to know today. Let's get right into the briefs. A few notes to tell you about the new iOS 26.4 beta one, which is out for developers and will eventually make its way to all iOS users. Apple has added support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages. Now, right now, it only works iPhone to iPhone. And that might sound a little silly to you because iMessage is already encrypted iPhone to iPhone. But if the test works, it could extend to non-iPhone messages. That's what a lot of people have been waiting for. So that could be cool. The podcast app also got support for a feature that lets you switch back and forth between the audio and video versions of a podcast. Lots of podcasts started out as audio and now are video. And, you know, so now you've got a little bit of an option there that comes with support for dynamically inserted video ads as well. And while we're talking about Apple OS betas, the Mac OS 26.4 beta lets you set a custom charge limit between 80 and 100 percent if you're looking to preserve your battery. And I know a lot of you out there really care about that whole don't let it go to 100, stay at 80 and then let it run down, stay at 80. So there you go. And this is if somebody wants to be like, yeah, but I'd rather it be 90 or maybe just this week. I need it to be closer to 100. You can do that. That's an interesting one. The podcast getting the video is going to be really interesting because of the number of platforms that are supporting it. It's being written about as if it's Apple competing with YouTube, but I think it's less Apple competing with YouTube than Apple understanding that so many people are making video versions of podcasts and they need to support that. Yeah. I mean, we've been doing a video version of, you know, DTNS in some form or another for many, many years. And people can, you know, choose to watch that or listen to the audio version. Those are two separate podcasts though, you know, and so to make this, I don't know, just to, you know, bring it back to a single circle of what you want to watch and or listen to based on, you know, are you driving? You're not going to be watching the podcast. Might be listening. Then you get home. Start watching. If it's seamless as it sounds, that sounds great to me. Yeah same here And then real quickly about the RCS stuff This is probably looks like less than it seems but they just added RCS end encryption to the standard last year in March So it been less than a year Google has rolled its own end encryption for RCS which is why you like oh but it been on Google for a longer time Apple is trying to work within the standard So I think this is a good sign that that is going to come eventually. Google is adapting to the new standard as well. So I feel like it's probably going to be another year maybe, but at least it's there. A team of scientists based in Tsinghua University in China published a paper in Nature describing a 3D printing technique that can complete a complex millimeter scale object in 0.6 seconds. Anybody who 3D prints knows that even something that small can take several minutes. The technique they used is called digital incoherent synthesis of holographic light fields, aka dish. 3D printing often is done with volumetric additive manufacturing. That's the kind of 3D printing we're talking about here. Normally, that puts out a thick resin and then cures it into solid shapes by projecting light through the material as it rotates. So you turn the platter, the light moves in and cures it in the right way so that you create the shape. And like I said, that can take 10 minutes. It can take hours if you're making something bigger. DISH uses the same principle, but what they do is keep the material stationary and rotate a high-speed multi-perspective light field around the stationary material. And that's the special sauce is figuring out the computer control to be able to do that rotation and keep it making the object you want. But they're able to do it, and it results in more precise projection and faster print time. Essentially, they're projecting a holographic image onto the resin to solidify it almost immediately. The system can reach speeds up to 333 cubic millimeters per second. If you're a 3D printer, that's going to mean something to you. For the rest of us, it's just fast. scientists speculate it could be used for mass production of micro components like phone camera modules uh it could also be used to create flexible robotic parts uh that that can't be 3d printed now custom tissue models for medical testing where you you need it to be very intricate and and you need a one-off and you need it right away uh so there's some real practical uses for this as well Yeah. For anybody who is deeply into 3D printing, you already know this. But for a lot of folks who just go like, oh, it's like a hobbyist thing. Like somebody's 3D printing something in their garage, right? I actually, a very good friend of mine is doing this exact thing and 3D printed a bunch of like really adorable plant planters, you know, for like succulent plants in a short amount of time. I mean, not in seconds, you know, but like over the weekend. And I was like, that's amazing. I would buy these for like way more money than it took you to make them. but when we're talking about something you know that is on the scale of you know seconds to make something and uh things that people need to buy something that you would say like oh i'm sure they have it on amazon type thing that's where this really comes into play because the hobbyist stuff it's like i mean what's a minute or two right maybe it doesn't matter that much to be like oh i can do it faster right yeah like faster is fun but it does it you know how much does it matter but But when we're talking about industry, then I think that that's where this actually matters a lot. It could decentralize industry because you could do it in a lot of different places. It can make a lot of things print on demand that aren't print on demand right now. Yeah, it's got some huge implications. I did not get a sense of how much it would take to make this practical and sell it to factories. It's just that they can do it. So there's a lot of questions in the implementation of it, but certainly it's promising because it can be done. News over the weekend, you may have heard of it. OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the developer who created ClawedBot, which was once MaltBot and is now called OpenClaw. A lot of stuff changed in a very short amount of time. Steinberger wrote, I'm joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent. Sam Altman, obviously the CEO of OpenAI, backed that up and added that OpenAI will support the open source foundation and the project. Implicator AI reported that Meta also tried to hire Steinberger. So, you know, a hot commodity in Silicon Valley. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of Google acquiring Android, right? Like taking a big stake in an open source project, but keeping it open source. OpenAI probably sees OpenClaw as a bit of the Android of the agentic movement. And this could help keep it more secure, make it a little easier. I still don't think it's necessarily easy to implement. And certainly you should know what you're doing if you're going to implement it. but it's going to make it better. And OpenAI is going to get the benefits of being able to take Steinberger's developments and implement them faster into their own agentic systems. I think it was interesting what Steinberger also said about, I didn't want to start a business. I just want to make things better. And joining up with OpenAI means that I get more resources to do that. I get money and I don't have to try. I did my part. I don't have to be responsible as well. Now, you know, I'm half kidding. I think this is a good partnership. Makes sense. Sounds like, you know, OpenClaw got a lot of attention. And, you know, lots of folks were interested in securing Peter Steinberger. steinberger uh yeah the the android comparison that that does make sense i i found the both of the um the um both steinberger and and uh why can't i think of his name sam altman we talk about him every single day yeah um both of their announcements felt very ai to me you know over the weekend you Their agents probably wrote them. Probably. No, honestly. I was like, this is such a weird announcement. But maybe that's the point. It's like, ha-ha, don't you get it? But yeah, it's cool. We got some emails also over the weekend from folks who have been experimenting with OpenClaw and had some really interesting stuff to say. So this is a new era for us. Yeah, I think if OpenClaw ends up fizzling out and is a flash in the pan, OpenAI gets a really smart guy who's done some interesting work in-house. And if it sticks around and develops into something more long-lasting, well, then they get that too. So it's no lose for OpenAI there. China's state media broadcast of the annual Spring Festival Gala, a.k.a. Chinese New Year, is one of the biggest broadcasts in the world. If you're not aware, peak concurrent viewers of the broadcast reached 400 million. Take that, Super Bowl. 79% of the available live audience in China was watching the gala, and it was full of robots. We watched it on YouTube to just kind of see all this stuff. The opening number featured Unitree humanoid robots that were performing martial arts demonstrations alongside human children. uh they even did the like drunken master uh you know drunken boxing style the robots did not the children uh the opening comedy sketch featured noetics humanoid robots using bite dances do bow chatbot uh and the skit was that you know grandson goes to visit grandma at new year and grandma's got four robot children that she likes more than the grandson it's kind of dystopic actually uh Magic Lab humanoids performed a synchronized dance number alongside humans singing, We Are Made in China. China accounted for 90% of the roughly 13,000 humanoid robots shipped globally last year. So if you encountered a humanoid robot, it likely was made in China. Morgan Stanley projects that China humanoid sales are going to double to 28 units this year So it still a smallish market but China making most of what exists So as you were explaining this, the only thing I could think about was the opening ceremony of the Olympics. In the future, like, do the robots just do it? Yeah, probably. Yeah. And then the humans go like, yeah, now we just we hang out until we have to actually ski. Well, that was one thing is they made sure to have humans with the robots in every one of these. So they weren't replacing the humans. But yeah, I thought it was interesting that it was children doing the martial arts. So it didn't show up the robots too bad. I mean, I don't have a problem with humanoid robots at all. It was entertaining. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I think for, it's kind of like, is something generated by AI, you know, on Sora or something like that? does that disturb you or do you think it's funny and depends on the context for something like this it seems fun and one thing that i took away from it is that humanoid robots are are are here you know they they may or may not be as capable as you need them for any particularly given task like we saw at ces with the laundry folder and all that but still waiting for you to uh empty my sink robot uh but but they are they are on their way like they are capable of walking around and dancing and falling down and getting back up and all the basic stuff now. So we've at least reached level one, I think. Well, if you want honest reviews from people who have not been able to secure a human aid robot yet, but we're on our way, but we do buy and live with lots of different kinds of technology, then we would love you to join us on Live With It. Every episode, I sit down and talk about something that either I or any guest that joins me has been using in their daily life. Current episode is Rob's discussion of the Sony EV1 camera. That's Rob Dunwood. He had some good and bad things to say about it. And that's not a new camera. This is very interesting. This is something you get on eBay. We'd love you to check out that episode. Listen to Live With It wherever fine podcasts are found. or you can watch us at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. Now some quick headlines, lots of stuff to catch up on on the weekend. So these are good little tidbits to know. I'm going to make you look smart. Apple invited media to a product experience on Wednesday, March 4th at 9 a.m. Eastern. We don't know what this is about, and it's not clear if it will even be streamed the next day thursday march 5th nothing plans to launch its next phone in london at 5 30 a.m eastern time and it will live stream it yeah nothing also used apple's invite and you know spray painted over it was clever uh micron's new pcie 6.0 solid state drive has entered mass production with 28 gigabyte per second speeds and support for air and liquid cooling, you are not going to get one of these because there's not even devices that can support it on the consumer level till 2030. These are going right into the data centers. Snapchat will launch creator subscriptions in the US starting on February 23rd for select creators. Yeah, not us, but Nintendo released its Virtual Boy app. This lets you emulate the 1990s VR headset on your Switch and Switch 2. You have to have the Virtual Boy accessories so that you can look through it and a Nintendo switch online and expansion pack membership. Virtual boy. I wish they would have changed the name. Uh, Airbnb is expanding its reserve now pay later option globally, which lets you reserve a property without having to pay until close to the time that you need it. And having been a previous Airbnb manager, I wonder how well this will work. They said that the test expanded the number of paid visits by quite a bit. So, yeah. But as the manager, the number of cancellations is probably also going up. Amazon-backed ex-energy reactor company has received U.S. approval to make uranium fuel for advanced nuclear reactors. This is the first U.S. approval for manufacturing uranium in 50 years. 50 years! Yeah. russian pro-war bloggers and some regional officials have posted criticisms of the government's restrictions on the use of telegram after the company was found to not be following a law requiring russian data to be stored locally you don't see russians criticizing things in public of the government too often so that that one's very intriguing uh wordpress has added a feature that lets you just describe changes you want to make to your website in natural language and then the virtual assistant will make them for you. Even vague things like, you know, make it more dynamic, stuff like that. It can handle. It's really interesting. According to release notes in Google Play services, Android phones will get a new local file backup feature powered by Google Drive, which will backup more files, probably everything in your download folder. Android Authority got a feature working in the beta of Google messages that'll let you copy a portion of the message instead of forcing you to copy the whole thing. That'll be a nice feature to have. Indeed. ByteDance issued a statement regarding its C-Dance 2.0 video generation tool, quote, we are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users. AKA, we got caught. Amazon's Fire TV OS update, the one that we talked about at CES in January, is now rolling out to U.S. users if you have a compatible Fire TV device. India's Adani Group announced it will spend $100 billion between now and 2035 to expand infrastructure for data centers in the country. Yeah, India wants to be the part of that pie. And then we have a lot of regulatory activity here. European Commission opened a probe into Chinese online retailer Shein over allegations of addictive design and the distribution of products like dolls that constitute CSAM. Ireland's Data Protection Commission, which enforced GDPR in the EU, has opened an inquiry into XAI's generation of non-consensual sexual imagery. And Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has asked the country's prosecutor to investigate X, TikTok, and Meta over the alleged publication of CSAM on those platforms by users, but without doing enough to have it removed. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper. Well, if you watch the Super Bowl, perhaps you've heard of it. The AI Awards definitely were part of the commercial part of the fun with Anthropic mocking OpenAI's plan to bring ads into chat GPT, basically saying they're coming, but not for moves. Andy Beach explains why ads inside chat are a different kind of monetization. Andy, thanks for coming back on the show to help us understand billionaires fighting with billionaires. Tom, always a pleasure to explain what billionaires do. Billionaires, they're just like us, except not at all. Okay, so I think most people probably have at least heard if not seen Anthropics ads where they have creepy video AI people slowly descending into advertising. You may or may not have heard OpenAI's response that, no, that's not what we do. What is going on here? Why do you think this is different? Yeah, this all sort of jumped around, sort of got even louder because of Super Bowl ads that came out. The LA Times had a piece talking about the fact that advertising was coming to OpenAI and Anthropic had responded, making fun of OpenAI around it. And I think this is telling because we are getting to a point in every sort of tech bubble that we have, and I'm not saying there's a bubble popping, but every time there's a tech that gets hyped, there's a certain amount of funding that just goes into making it a reality. We saw it with streaming for a long time where it was ridiculously cheap to have a subscription to something. And we've had similar things in AI. But now everything is coming home to roost and it time to start figuring out how to actually monetize this And advertising is always one of the ways that gets approached So OpenAI is under a massive gun right now They had a lot of different press out there around responding to Google Gemini advances and other things that have gone on on the tech side. So now they really have to figure out how to monetize. Advertising inside of the chat itself is the area that they are exploring with. And that's exactly what Anthropic was mocking in its Super Bowl ad. And Anthropic was doing a, while you're getting your response to your question, an ad will be worked into that response. OpenAI has been pretty clear that that is not how they're going to place these ads. Yes. And they can make it as clear as they want. But I think until people experience it, there's going to be a lot of black mirror assumptions about how the advertising will impact the answer the AI is giving me. And the other thing that I think muddies the waters is OpenAI is putting ads on one of its paid tiers. There's the new Go tier, which is only $8 a month only compared to the $20 a month for the plus tier. But it is not as robust in its limits. I don't think people really understand the difference other than like, oh, well, I have to pay less for that one. But then I get ads. And so this doesn't become as clear as OpenAI saying, look, you only get ads if you don't pay. And that will make people who do pay for the $20 tier wonder when the ads will come to them. Or I think in more fringy areas, wonder if, well, I'm paying for it and they do ads and paid promotions. Am I getting an ad right now from this response? Yeah, I think, you know, ads in other products are so much easier to identify. And I think the one of the biggest worries here is that it's going to be so commingled in that it becomes hard to tell the difference between what is an ad versus what is just a fact based answer. And I think part of that is that, you know, we still don't 100% trust the AI to give us that answer. We still question whether it's a hallucination. Now we get to add, is it a hallucination or an advertisement that I'm getting on top of that? You know, and I tried to think back around like when advertising came to Gmail and some of the other technologies that we've experienced this in. And it was speculated and it was hotly debated. And then all the fervor sort of died down once we saw what the actual implementation was, because it was very obvious what an ad was and an ad wasn't. And it was easy to ignore if we chose it. I think the biggest tell here will be once it's out there, which it is active in the U.S. now, but once we've had time to utilize it, are we going to care? And is it obvious what the ad is so that we don't feel like we're being lied to about? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Once you see the chat GPT implementation, I think some people will feel better like, oh, it's just the ad down there. Got it. It's not in my query response directly. But then you have Google over there muddying the waters, putting shopping recommendations in AI mode, which are advertisements for the shopping. And those are clearly within the query response because the value proposition is you can tell Gemini, yes, complete my checkout for this item. Right. And so people are going to point to that and say, but over here, they're definitely doing it. I think people also forget about the sort of the fervor there was around sponsored links in searches when Google first started adding advertising there. I mean, again, it's I think advertising comes to all technologies at some point and it becomes a messy area until we see how it's implemented. And it'll be key for open AI to succeed here by responding and adapting to to any complaints and uproar that they actually get. But having to weed that out from the speculation, which I think right now we're still just clearly in a speculative state. Yeah. When people see it. I have found in watching technology for the past 30 years that two things are true. It's never as bad as everybody fears. Right. And whenever ads are involved, it clutters up your interface because it has to for the ad to work. So the nice, clean lines of these things are not going to be the same, just as Google's nice, clean 2000 search results are not the same with the ads cluttering things up. But it probably won't be as horrible as we expect. Yeah. Yeah, I think it comes down to that. Now, the flip side of that coin is if they pull this off and it's successful, I promise you we will see ads on every other AI bot agent that is out there in the very near future, because it will become an obvious path for helping monetize these, which all the companies are beginning to look for. So it becomes a balancing act of how successful ultimately we want it to be. And then, then it becomes the same problem we had in streaming, which is, are we just, are we chasing a price tag that it takes to turn the advertisement off? Yeah. And, and does that price tag get bigger? Does it float up? You know, how many plans are resistant or as in some cases with media, does it just not exist at all? Because the ads are too lucrative. Right. Well, I don't know if it's an ad for you to tell people where to find more of what you do, but I think it's a valuable service to do it anyway. So tell people where they could find more of what you do. I think we've clearly put it in the sponsored area, so I think we're okay to say it. But I do writing about media and AI technology and where they converge and collapse in some places on my sub stack, and that's called EnginesOfChange.ai. EnginesOfChange.ai. And Andy paid for that mention with nothing but his time here today on the show. Thank you, Andy. Thanks, Tom. Good to see you. So yeah. I also really like Andy's license plates. I just, I just, I'm into it. Everybody likes a good license plate. For anybody who's just listening, he just has a really cool studio setup. Indeed, indeed. Yeah. Good stuff from Andy, as always. As always. As always, we end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Matt is explaining his mixed feelings about smart glasses. Yeah, Matt wrote thanks for the show and for sparking conversations that get me thinking. I wanted to share a few thoughts on last Friday's discussion around Metta's Ray-Ban glasses. On a personal note, I'm both creeped out by Metta's facial recognition, but also I really connected with the idea of tools that help with name recall. I have a severe issue remembering people's names, which creates a lot of anxiety in public and work situations. A tool that could remind me of names I already know or people who have introduced themselves to me would be genuinely helpful. At work, I keep a document that links names and faces to help me cope, but it only works when I'm at my computer. I'm also aware that some co-workers with great name recall might find that document creepy, even though it's something I rely on. Well, I don't think you're alone, Matt. I think a lot of us struggle with this, and it does create social anxiety because you don't want to seem rude. You know, you've met somebody, you remember them. What's your name? Is it Matt? Is it Andy? Is it Tom? Is it Sarah? And, you know, something like this could actually be really helpful in those situations. And yeah, I think there is a way to implement it that is non-creepy and helpful at the same time. I'll leave that there as far as like, will it be implemented that way? That's a whole separate conversation. I mean, if you can remember my name much easier, I don't think that's creepy. right right but if you're like doing image recognition for some other nefarious purpose then yeah exactly right well if you're thinking about anything like matt's um and you want to let us know um and have us talk about it on a future show uh insight on a story anything like that share it with us feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com yes big thanks to andy beach and matt for contributing to today's show thank you for being along for daily tech news show you keep us in business folks if you haven't yet become a patron big thanks to all the new patrons we just got you can join us at patreon.com slash dtns the dtns family of podcasts helping each other understand priming club hopes you have enjoyed this program
