Prime Video offers the best in entertainment. This should be fun. Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista... ...goan completely loose in the hilarious new action film The Wrecking Crew. Inbegrepen by Prime. Yeah, I'm pumped. Find the new Game of Thrones series A Night of the Seven Kingdoms. Based on the bestseller of George R.R. Martin. Look by being a member of HBO Max. So be brave, be just. So whatever you want to find, Prime Video. Here you look at everything. Abonnement is revised. Inputs can be found 18+. The general rules are of use. F F F this is the daily tech news month in review for february 2026 we're going to look back on what the biggest stories of the month were and uh try to help ourselves and the and you understand what the heck was going on it's a short month but a lot of stories oh man this month we had ramageddon continuing and scaring everybody microsoft got a new head of gaming and the world wrestled with open claw. Yes, the claw, the claw continued. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's look back on some of the biggest stories of February, 2026. First, we like to ask an LLM what it thinks are the biggest stories of the month. And so this month, Jen suggested, let's try perplexity. We haven't tried perplexity yet. So I told it, what are the biggest tech stories this month? I kept it very simple with this prompt. It said AI chips and data center arms race. Pretty good. We're going to have, that's our, that's our first one too. It talked about meta inking multi-year deals, which I thought was a weird way to start that, but also Nvidia and AMD, Nvidia continuing to post record quarters. We're going to get into that. It mentioned the Samsung Galaxy S26 launch, which was definitely a big story. It mentioned Apple planning its March launch, which will be one of the big stories of March, I have a feeling, but kind of a big story that people are anticipating it and they're doing it differently than they have done before by not having a single keynote, but stretching a few announcements across a week. TikTok's proposed US venture and negotiations around who controls its recommendation algorithm. That's just wrong. That's something that is already done. There is no negotiation to happen about that. So it hallucinated that one. Meta exploring facial recognition features in smart glasses, though. That was definitely one we had on our consideration list. Ring canceling its partnership with Flock did not. Oh, yeah, no, it did mention the Super Bowl backlash over the surveillance stuff. That was another big one. Nano Banana 2 coming out from Google. That was a big one. uh anthropic uh acquired a computer use startup i i don't think that was one of the biggest stories of the month but it put that one in there um governments and courts pressing on energy use pricing and responsibilities that's one of those kind of like yeah that's not a story that's a trend right yeah um and then a new neuromorphic chip for robotic vision showing progress in low power event-based hardware i thought that was an interesting choice uh and sk hynix and other memory makers trying to ramp up output, which kind of that one ties into the ram again. How would you grade perplexity, Jen? I am not surprised that perplexity stuck in a whole bunch of AI stories that may or may not have been large in the scene. It's reflecting a personal bias on perplexity's part, perhaps. Yeah. And, you know, to grade it as an English TA, the sentences are okay, but it is point form and point form aren't technically supposed to be full sentences because then it's not point form. Okay. All right. So you're giving it a B, B plus? What do you... It's B, B minus kind of thing just because of the slight tangents from the actual big stories. Sure. And the one totally hallucinated story. Solved problem. Here's a few things that we considered, but it did not. India's AI summit was going on, and there was a lot of news came out of that. Global South definitely gets short shrift from the international press, and I think perplexity reflected that bias. There were a lot of deals done there. India really trying to position itself as a neutral ground for people to build out infrastructure and data centers. uh spacex acquiring xai uh was was early in the month uh and was big at the time i think people kind of forgot that one and have what was happening we're going to talk about the contini memo but um there was also the schumer uh post on blogspot about like i don't need to code anymore that that sends some ripples around um apple uh announcing video podcast video podcasting push will be coming uh microsoft's 10 000 year data storage uh glass data storage for long-term data storage and metaverse taking her right or meta metaverse meta taking its horizon worlds and putting it mobile first uh those are some other ones that we considered all right let's get to ramageddon because that i think is the biggest story of the month that includes nvidia's great earnings uh The Steam machine being delayed because of the inability to properly predict the price of RAM. Hard drive makers saying that they are sold out on regular old hard drives. So it's expanding to new things. Rumor that Sony might delay its planned release of a PS6 to either 2028 or 2029. Where should we go first, Jen? There's so much. Well, obviously, I want to talk about the gaming thing. gamers have had a very complicated month there's been some some big releases the uh the marathon bungees marathon coming back and doing their uh their server test the other day so like there's been some happy stuff and then there's the where is my steam machine why is the steam deck sold out absolutely everywhere what is going to happen with sony what is going to happen with xbox which we will get to in depth in a bit uh but it's a lot of panic especially about the hard drive stuff Because, again, from the gaming standpoint, base hard drives in the systems are okay. But, you know, we want more because games are freaking massive. And now it's very, very hard to get particular hard drives, whether you're buying a new computer or just beefing up an old one or backing up everything, as people should be doing. So, you know, you haven't heard of backup in a while. There's a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt around this, too, because we haven't got to the shortage yet. There is the prediction of the shortage. We are out of commitments. You can no longer, as an enterprise customer, pre-order our hard drives. And people hear that and they think, oh, I can't buy a hard drive if I go down to Best Buy. You absolutely can't, or Micro Center or wherever, right? It a misunderstanding of like you know we go to trade shows and we take pre and some of those pre are retail and the retailers have locked in a certain amount of components that they be able to sell But if you want to come and lock in a supply, well, guess what? We're out. Now that will cause a problem down the road, but it does cause a little bit of the toilet paper effect, right? Which is everybody hears, oh, they're out of hard drives. I need a hard drive. I better run down and get one. And suddenly when 100 people are running to Micro Center to buy 50 hard drives, Micro Center has to raise the price because that's more people who want them than they have hard drives. And that causes the actual price to go up. And everybody's like, see, the prices are going up already. So it doesn't mean there isn't a shortage, but there's also a little bit of that panic buying happening now that is driving up prices in the near term. And I'm not trying to be overly optimistic. they're not going to come down anytime soon. No, for Western Digital, when the story broke that they've sold through this year and next, and that they have more commitments coming, for people who love Western Digital drives for their RAID setups, yeah, there was a lot of panic buying there for the specific ones that they want for the reds and the blacks and stuff. I am lucky that I have tons of drives that I just haven't put in yet because I'm lazy and trying to, Frankenstein a new box. I am happy to not be a part of this, but as somebody who does need to beef up my RAM because my primary system has 16 and we just don't have to talk about how long that stuff takes to render. Yeah, I'm going to have to wait on that or wait for a friend to upgrade and just buy their old stuff. Yeah, it is definitely a situation where it is going to be interesting to see how this problem gets solved along the way. There will be a point at which new capacity comes online. There will be a point at which the demand declines. People who believe in a bubble think the demand is going to decline a lot sooner. So if you're both predicting RAM will be gone forever and a bubble, you're at cross purposes. It's definitely one or the other. But usually what happens in these kinds of things is we see some creative solutions that would have never happened if we didn't have to do them. Some of them will be people figuring out how to do more with less. So a phone maker that figures out how to utilize a lower amount of RAM and get more out of it with RAM as cheap as it's been, nobody's ever bothered optimizing for memory use, right? So we may see a lot of that happening and becoming a differentiator. But there's other stuff that that is going to happen that nobody can predict yeah i because i was wondering about that nobody's really thought of okay what do we do for storage well okay except for microsoft and glass thing if they want to give that to all of us right now that would solve a lot of problems but uh but yeah uh from the consumer standpoint all we have are hard drives to put stuff on there is no no backup to that unless you want to pay for cloud things which again are raising their prices there's a big gaming site the archive that uh they're basically closing because they're like yeah so our data storage bill jumped to 6 000 a month and we're out that's it i was gonna say nothing left the cloud storage needs hard drives and ram exactly so it's not it's not like you can avoid it like like it's magical there's an endless amount of hard drives and ram up there uh yeah it's It's always fascinating to watch the direst predictions don't come true and the unexpected solutions arise whenever there is a real problem. And that's not me trying to say there isn't a real problem. There absolutely is. Uh, but it's, it's, it's going to, it's going to be, it's, it's going to, I keep repeating myself. It's going to be fascinating to see what these companies do to get around it. Um, because there will be solutions. There will be enterprising folks who are like, well, I actually, why don't you just do this? And a bunch of certain go, why didn't we think of that? Right. When we were doing the February wrap up, you know, of course, no one's going to stop using computers or stop saving stuff. So a solution has to be found. And it's not like hard drives have disappeared. They're still making them. And I think some people are laboring under the impression like, oh, the data center builders bought all the hard drives and there won't be any more. There will be them. They will be on the shelf. Short-term demand is driving up the price. And then there will be more coming in the future. It's just that the supply will be restricted. And so if you continue to need RAM, hard drivers and other components at the level that you wanted them before, you're going to have to pay more. But it's not like they will disappear from the shelves. I say smash cut to June and empty shelves at Micro Center when there's no RAM because there was a flood in Taiwan and the razor thin margin we have for capacity is wiped out. But, you know, if all things hold as true, they'll just be very expensive and hard to get, but not impossible to get. I will share one Doomer prediction, which made me laugh, but also makes me go, hmm, is that in the future that the manufacturers may cheap out a little and we might end up with situations like the old iOmega zip drives where click of death was super common. And the very specific IBM desk star, which everyone in IT called the desk star because it just blew up all of the time. And I'm like, oh, I don't want to go back to those days. I hope you're wrong. Yeah, I think that's also going to happen. And we'll obviously get more clicks than the innovative solution that works. Companies will cheap out because they can and that increases capacity. And then you'll have a bunch of hard drives that are bum or a bunch of RAM that burns out faster. Like, be on the lookout for that. When you find that screaming deal on RAM from a company you've never heard of before, remember Jen's Doomer prediction and pause for a second before you click buy. Also, I mean, I think it's worth tying in here. I mentioned it real quickly earlier in the show. The shortage is driven by the demand to build infrastructure, to build data centers. NVIDIA is an interesting example of this phenomenon in that they had like a 73% increase in revenue. And everybody said, yeah, but can they keep it up? Right? There is a lot of pessimism over the amount of money being spent on the buildout. That was a huge running story throughout this month. And then we had the Contini report, which was a fictional future analysis of everything went right and now no one has any jobs. There are a million very valid critiques of like, yeah, but you left out this and you didn't consider that. And we know that that wasn't your point. But if you were to really do an actual rational analysis instead of a work of fiction, you would have to consider all of these other mitigating factors. Financial Times did a great job of that. There's a few other sources that did a great job of that. If you want to not freak out about the Contini report, I highly recommend going and reading them. But nevertheless this fictional Substack post caused the markets to fall and they have stayed falling It has depressed market enthusiasm for a currently booming market right? You've got 73% revenue increase from NVIDIA, but the fallout from that Contini report, yeah, but I don't know. I don't know. I'm down on AI either because I think it will be too good and throw everyone out of jobs, or I think it's a bunch of crap and you're wasting your money and everybody's going to go out of business. Yeah. I can't think of the last time a story had this kind of real world impact financially. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was a market mover and really made me jealous as a fiction writer. Their ability to have an impact is the story. All right. That is only our first topic. So hang on, folks. There's more. THE END For our second topic, I am, of course, going to talk about gaming and Xbox because Asha Sharma takes over and Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond are out. They have left Microsoft Gaming. And it was definitely a surprise to people as Sarah Bond was posting on LinkedIn about future questions about gaming like the day before it happened. So something accelerated it. We don't exactly know what. but Phil Spencer was clearly more ready to leave. And apparently Spencer last summer started the process of like, Hey guys, I'm going to wrap it up here. I'll take as long as you need, but let's, let's get the ball rolling. And then a part of the outcry from specific subsets of gamers who feel a little entitled. I'll just, I'll say the word entitled. We're very upset that Asha Sharma is not a gamer, which she immediately owned on Twitter because she started asking for recommendations of stuff to play, which, again, was not taken well by those certain subsets. But I'm a little more generous here. One of the most amazing tech execs I used to work with studied the stars. She was a professor. She was great at mathematics and all this other stuff. And again, she ran this company. It was a cross-Canada company, did amazing. She sold and got out and, I don't know, owns an island somewhere now. So I am more willing to accept somebody who isn't a subject matter expert as long as they're also a – have a good head for business. So let's see, because Sharma began her career in marketing, so I'm like, that could work. Worked time at Meta, worked at Instacart, and worked at AI. which made people very nervous. So she had to come out with a statement saying that I'm not interested in AI slop. Stories are made by humans, which, hooray, saying the right things. We'll see how it goes. Do you feel optimistic about this change or just kind of neutral? I'm chaotic neutral about this change. I kind of swing back and forth a little bit, but I'm not terribly pessimistic. I have no problem with Microsoft saying, let's take the person that helped Instacart do their IPO and focus on profitability and help bring Instacart from clearly going to be crushed by Amazon to a force to be reckoned with in a very difficult and razor thin margin industry. I think that's one of her most shining examples. But also being able to get Microsoft to respond to the DeepSeek threat and put it on Azure in record time to meet demand. This is a person who clearly doesn't need to be an expert in either food or AI to get a team to do the thing that the team needs to do. And that, I think, will be incredibly invaluable in the Xbox world. I'm a little more concerned or curious about Matt Booty being put as the chief creative content officer, the chief content officer. Asha Sharma is going to run the show and Booty will report to Sharma. But I think Sharma is delegating the content questions to Booty. Like, what game should we make? Where should we focus our efforts? What should the games do? That's Booty's call. and I've heard mixed reviews about him. I don't know about you, Jen. You just wanted to say Booty's call, didn't you? I did not, but I did say it now that you've mentioned it. I should have seen that coming and reveled in it and I totally didn't. It was going in my mind, so one of us was going to say it. I'm just happy it's out there. But as for Booty, I am, again, I want to give everybody a chance here. Like, yeah, I think that Asha is going to work on the profitability, as you said, because like Nintendo is the only one basically who makes a profit on the console. And I am expecting some more Xbox price changes in the near future. And I think just getting the team to work better. That seems to be her biggest thing is like, she's an amazing project manager and amazing at getting people to have a good message to make people who use the Xbox feel good about it. I think she'll be good at both those things. Yeah. Well, it's like in the NHL when somebody fires the coach, new guy comes in and immediately teams go on a tear so we'll see yeah right that's the case or or if they tank but uh for booty if booty can avoid the trap of trying to chase what no longer works like as long as the first thing they announce isn't another live service game that will give me hope for the future because like people need new games whether it's triple a double a or promoting more indies like they have done on Game Pass, I think it could work. Yeah. I've said this on the DTNS Live Hangout on Thursday, and I've said it on DTNS proper before, but I don't think Microsoft is wrong to focus on cloud gaming. I think that is the future and they're getting a leg up on everybody else by being their first and being a cloud company that can deliver it. I think the messaging on that has been bad and maybe the focus has been a little off as well which is i think why sarah bond is gone uh and i think that's one thing that sharma will fix we will see if matt booty may also be able to help keep those priorities in order as well yeah and xbox have received a surprising amount of scrutiny for this because like for nintendo when reggie fizzimi left everybody was sad and then the new guy was named doug bowser and immediately everyone's like oh yeah no awesome Yeah, that's gonna be fine. He was born for this role. You think it would have been better if they would have hired someone named Halo? Yeah, I gotta be honest. If they had anyone in the company named Cortana, free and clear. I think Nintendo needs to start internally promoting anyone named Rosalina and they be set for the future But like what was the last time you thought about Sony of America CEO Yeah right Exactly Not not not ever So, yeah. But yeah, the, the other surprise was Seamus Broccoli, one of the co-founders of Xbox, immediately coming out with like questions and concerns and made the bold statement of how this is the sun setting of Xbox. which was uh yeah that also then he very quickly came out and said no no no i'm i'm bullish on the xbox uh that's what they told me to say he didn't say that's what they told me to say but it was very clear that somebody talked to him and said can you go out and just contradict that and he's like yeah all right fine great uh xbox will be fine don't worry but he didn't actually renounce any of the other things that he said i say all those interviews are still out there nobody's Corrections, those were new stories which did not get half of the play. Yeah. Okay, that is two of our three top stories for February or four if you're a patron. So hold please for the next one. Wie zorgt er voor jouw inkomen bij arbeidsongeschiktheid? Als ondernemer neem je risico's, maar sommige zaken wil je gewoon goed geregeld hebben. With the Univy's service insurance of Univy, you'll get that certainty. Find out how you can protect your income at univy.nl. Univy, where you'll be the fruits of the fruit. This month, the story evolved. More people used it. More people ran into its limitations and successes. Some people have been showing off that it can do some amazing things if you put in the work and are careful. Most security-minded people say it's probably better to not do it. But I think the culmination of OpenClaw's story in the month of February was when on February 15th, smack dab in the middle of the month, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberg was hired by OpenAI to join the foundation and continue open source work on it with OpenAI founding it or funding it and giving Steinberger some structure around it so that OpenAI can incorporate some of the best features of it into its own agency. agents, but also keep it going as an open source program and developing for people who want to play with it. It felt a lot like when Meta grabbed Instagram. It's like, all right, this is going to be a problem for us. We should make it part of ours. Yeah, there's a little of that in there. It's also a little bit like Google bringing in Android and saying, like, we'll administer this open source program. It'll continue to be an open source program, but the people who work on it work for us for the most part. But we're not shutting down the open source side of it. I think that's kind of how open AI might see it is like, this could become something that is as important as Android in the future. When it first came out as Claudebot, it blew up on my feeds. All my developer friends started playing with it, even ones who were not big on AI, just because of the initial successes it had in doing things that other things could not do. And yeah, so CloudBot to MoltBot, I heard so much about it and the AI agentic features and stuff, but everybody was very high level about it and not too specific on what they were making. So I ended up getting a little lost on what happened. And then as soon as OpenAI hired him, I stopped hearing about it. Oh, I have not. I continue to hear about it pretty regularly, but I'm hearing about it in places that are talking about what you can do with it rather than stories that are trying to get you to click on them because of how awful it is. And I think we ran through those pretty quickly when it was new. Like, oh, it's got this security vulnerability, which was then patched. Oh, it could be misused this way, which now people know not to do, right? The second parts never get as many clicks as the first parts, kind of like trying to remember the name of the president of sony america uh it's you know uh it's it's just not flashy to say uh claude bot or open claw open claw uh getting better being used more responsibly nobody wants to click on that story uh and not saying that open claw is safe to use in any way but it is definitely for the people who like playing with it uh they are figuring out what it's good for and i think open eye was smart to say like Sure, it is rough and tumble in Wild West, but it won't necessarily be forever. And Steinberger really was showing some amazing chops and had no interest in running a company. And that's one of the things Steinberger said in his blog announcing this is, I don't really care where I work, but I don't want to run a company. I just want to work on this. And OpenAI was the company that gave me a deal that will allow me to just continue to work on it. And so some people criticized him as selling out. Why can't you be more like Linus Torvalds and just stay outside the system? But I think Steinberger was like, yeah, but I get the best of both worlds. I get to continue to code and play and run this program and money at the same time. So why not? Somebody offered me all of these resources to do exactly what I was doing. Yeah, exactly. And I think it will pay off for OpenAI. It may not always be obvious how it's paying off. And OpenAI may not always tout how it's paying off, but they're going to be able to look at the code. Not that anybody else can't. It's going to remain open source, but they'll be able to look at the code. They'll be able to talk to Steinberger and say, hey, if we do this, What do you think of this idea? And get some direct advice that they might not get otherwise. Yeah. And they bought some bonus PR. Because now if there is a new feature that they can attribute to him, they get to say, hey, this guy also did this. And that is going to be big in the news cycle without it feeling like, oh, it's just more of the same. It'd be like, no, oh, this cool guy who did this cool thing is doing a new thing. Not to mention ask him to do things. Like, hey, we want to be able to do this. Is that something you can make happen? Well, there you go. I suspect this will be the last month for OpenClaw as a big story, but I don't think it's the last we'll hear about OpenClaw in the future. So everyone else, what did you think about these stories? Do you think we missed anything, even in our things that we almost talked about? Because we want to hear about it. So please share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. thanks to you for being along for daily tech news show you can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash dtns uh if you see a patron on the street thank them for making the show possible so that you can listen to it and patrons stick around we've got one more story for you we're going to talk about the discord age verification backlash the dtns family of podcasts helping each other understand diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program Thank you.
