DTNS February in Review

0:04Jenn Cutter: 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 try to help ourselves and you understand what the heck was going on. It was a short month, but a lot of stories.

0:19Tom Merritt: 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.

0:30Jenn Cutter: Yes, the claw. The claw continued. I'm Tom Merritt.

0:34Tom Merritt: I'm Jen Cutter.

0:35Jenn 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 gonna 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.

1:19Jenn Cutter: 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 didn't that was not some that's something that is already done there's no negotiation to happen about that so uh it hallucinated that one um meta exploring facial recognition features and smart glasses though that was definitely one we had on our consideration list ring canceling its partnership uh with flock uh did not oh yeah no it did mention the super bowl backlash over the surveillance stuff that was another big one um nano banana 2 coming out from google that was a 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?

2:33Jenn Cutter: Yeah. And then a new neuromorphic chip for robotic vision showing progress in low-power event-based hardware. I thought that was an interesting choice. 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?

2:52Tom Merritt: 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.

3:02Jenn Cutter: It's reflecting a personal bias on perplexity's part, perhaps.

3:06Tom Merritt: 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.

3:18Jenn Cutter: Okay. All right. So you're giving it a B, B plus? What do you...

3:21Tom Merritt: It's B, B minus kind of thing, just because of the slight tangents from the actual big story.

3:29Jenn Cutter: Sure. And the one totally hallucinated story. Solved the 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. SpaceX acquiring XAI was early in the month and was big at the time. I think people kind of forgot that one was happening. We're going to talk about the Contini memo, but there was also the Schumer post on Blogspot about like, I don't need to code anymore.

4:20Jenn Cutter: That sends some ripples around. Um, Apple, uh, announcing video podcast, a video podcasting push will be coming, uh, Microsoft's 10 ,000 year data storage, uh, glass data storage for long-term data storage, uh, 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 that includes nvidia's great earnings uh the steam machine being delayed because of the inability to properly predict the price of ram uh hard drive makers saying that they are sold out uh on on regular old hard drives so it's expanding to new things uh rumor that sony might delay its planned release of a ps6 to either 2028 or 2029 uh where should we go first jen there's so much

5:16Tom Merritt: uh well obviously i i want to talk about the gaming thing uh 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 uh base uh hard drives in the systems are okay but uh 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 there's a backup in a while there's a lot of fear uncertainty

6:12Jenn Cutter: in 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, or Micro Center or wherever, right? It's a misunderstanding of like, we go to trade shows and we take pre-orders and some of those pre-orders are retail and the retailers have locked in a certain amount of components that they'll be able to sell. But if you want to come and lock in a supply, well, guess what?

6:52Jenn Cutter: 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 a hundred 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.

7:30Jenn Cutter: And I'm not trying to be overly optimistic. They're not going to come down anytime soon.

7:36Tom Merritt: 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. But I am happy to not be 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.

8:16Tom Merritt: Yeah, I'm going to have to wait on that or wait for a friend to upgrade and just buy their old stuff.

8:23Jenn Cutter: 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 uh some of them will be people figuring out how to do more with less uh so a phone maker that figures out how to utilize a lower amount of ram and get more out of it uh 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 that happening and becoming a differentiator uh but you know There's other stuff that is going to happen that nobody can predict.

9:29Tom Merritt: Yeah, because I was wondering about that. Nobody's really thought of, okay, what do we do for storage? Well, okay, except for Microsoft and the Glass thing. If they want to give that to all of us right now, that would solve a lot of problems. But yeah, from the consumer standpoint, all we have are hard drives to put stuff on. There is 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 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.

10:05Jenn Cutter: I was going to say, the cloud storage needs hard drives and RAM. Exactly.

10:09Tom Merritt: So it's not like you can avoid it. Like it's magical.

10:13Jenn Cutter: There's an endless amount of hard drives and RAM up there. Yeah, 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. But it's going to be – I keep repeating myself. It's going to be fascinating to see what these companies do to get around it because there will be solutions. There will be enterprising folks who are like, well, actually, why don't you just do this? And a bunch of us are going to go, why didn't we think of that when we were doing the February wrap-up months ago?

11:01Jenn Cutter: Of course.

11:02Tom Merritt: No one's going to stop using computers or stop saving stuff. So a solution has to be found.

11:08Jenn Cutter: 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 drives, 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.

11:43Jenn Cutter: 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 if all things hold as true, they'll just be very expensive and hard to get, but not impossible to get.

12:04Tom Merritt: 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.

12:32Jenn Cutter: 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. 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.

13:20Jenn Cutter: 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? 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, that 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.

14:06Jenn Cutter: Financial Times did a great job of that. There's a few other sources 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 fallen. 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, like, yeah, but I don't know. I don't know. I'm just, 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.

14:50Yeah.

14:50Tom Merritt: I can't think of the last time a story had this kind of real world impact financially.

14:56Jenn Cutter: 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.

15:19Tom Merritt: 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.

15:50Jenn Cutter: 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 get the ball rolling.

16:00Tom Merritt: And then part of the outcry from specific subsets of gamers who feel a little entitled, I'll say the word entitled, were 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. sets, 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.

16:51Tom Merritt: 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. Cause, uh, so let's see, cause Sharma began her career in marketing. So I'm like, that could work, uh, work time at Meta, uh, worked at Instacart and worked at AI, which, you know, made people very nervous. So she had to come out with a statement saying that I'm not interested in AI slop, you know, 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 neutral?

17:32Jenn Cutter: I'm chaotic neutral about this change. I 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 It 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.

18:26Jenn Cutter: 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. uh asha sharma is going to run the show and booty will report to to sharma uh but i i think sharma is delegating the content questions to booty like what games should we make where should we focus our efforts what should the games do that's that's booty's call and i've heard mixed reviews about

19:02Tom Merritt: 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

19:08Jenn Cutter: say it now that you mention it. I should have seen that coming and reveled in it, and I totally didn't.

19:15Tom Merritt: 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 Nintendo's the only one, basically, who makes a profit on the console, and I am expecting some more Xbox price changes in the near future.

19:40Jenn Cutter: 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.

19:53Tom Merritt: 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 if that's the case or if they tank. But for Booty, if Booty can avoid the trap of trying to chase what no longer works, As long as the first thing they announce isn't another live service game, that will give me hope for the future because people need new games, whether it's AAA, AA, or promoting more indies like they have done on Game Pass. I think it could work. Yeah.

20:26Jenn Cutter: 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 there 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. 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.

21:01Tom Merritt: yeah and xbox had 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

21:16Jenn Cutter: role you think it would have been better if they would have uh hired someone named halo

21:23Tom Merritt: uh 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'll be set for the future. But what was the last time you thought about Sony of America's CEO?

21:39Jenn Cutter: Yeah, right. Exactly. Not ever.

21:46Tom Merritt: But yeah, the other surprise was Seamus Brockley, one of the co-founders of Xbox, immediately coming out with questions and concerns and made the bold statement of how this is the sun setting of Xbox, which was, yeah, that also.

22:05Jenn Cutter: He very quickly came out and said, no, no, no, I'm bullish on the Xbox. 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. Xbox will be fine. Don't worry. But he didn't actually renounce any of the other things that he said.

22:25Tom Merritt: I would say all those interviews are still out there. Nobody's issued corrections. Those were new stories, which did not get half of the play.

22:32Jenn Cutter: 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.

22:46Jenn Cutter: ClawedBot, a.k.a. MaltBot, a.k.a. OpenClaw, and actually for most of February, it's been OpenClaw, began in January, was a big story in January, but 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 Open Claw's story in the month of February was when on On February 15th, right 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 agents, but also keep it going as an open source program and developing for people who want to play with it.

23:50Tom Merritt: 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.

24:00Jenn Cutter: 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, you know, 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.

24:29Tom Merritt: like when it first came out as clodbot 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 like initial successes it had in doing things that that other things could not do uh and yeah so clodbot 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.

25:05Jenn Cutter: 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. It's, you know, it's just not flashy to say Claudebot or OpenClaw.

25:47Jenn Cutter: OpenClaw getting better, being used more responsibly. Nobody wants to click on that story. and not saying that OpenClaw is safe to use in any way, but it is definitely for the people who like playing with it. They are figuring out what it's good for. And I think OpenAI 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.

26:23Jenn Cutter: 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, you know, some people criticized him as selling out. Why can't you be more like Linus Torvalds and just, you know, 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?

26:53Tom Merritt: Somebody offered me all of these resources to do exactly what I was doing.

26:57Jenn Cutter: 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.

27:24Tom Merritt: 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. To be like, no, oh, this cool guy who did this cool thing is doing a new thing.

27:43Jenn Cutter: 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 Open Claw as a big story. But I don't think it's the last we'll hear about Open Claw in the future. Mm hmm.

28:01Tom Merritt: 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 DailyTechNewsShow.com.

28:17Jenn Cutter: 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.