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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Tuesday, January 20, 2026 I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Netflix ups its bid with all cash Sony is spinning off its legendary TV business with tcl, one of the biggest seed rounds I've ever heard of. Reels continues to win for Zuck. And let me introduce you to the Assistant Axis and what it might mean for AI. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech, There's a lot of chatter about using AI agents right now, but no one seems to be talking about how these agents aren't always perfect. Sometimes they delete the wrong files or make changes you didn't authorize, and when that happens, you're left to clean up the mess. That is, unless you're using Rubrik Agent Cloud. It's the only platform that allows you to monitor, govern and rewind AI agent actions. And if your business relies on AI agents, you need those abilities on a singular platform. It helps you unleash more agents faster while mitigating risk. If you're running AI agents and want to sleep better at night, Rubrik is worth checking out. Right now, my listeners get exclusive early access to the platform. Head to rubrik.com that's R U B R I K.com Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery say that Netflix has revised its WBD offer to an all cash deal for $27.75 per share with the same $82.7 billion valuation. Netflix's original bid had $59 billion in debt financing. Quoting CNN, the companies hope that the new all cash offer will help fend off Paramount's hostile takeover bid for all of WBD. Netflix is offering $27.75 per WBD share for the company's movie studio and streaming assets, which are due to be split off into a new publicly traded company called Warner Bros. Later this year. CNN and other channels owned by WBD will become part of a separate company called Discovery Global. Netflix had previously offered $23.25 per share in cash and the rest in Netflix stock, enabling Paramount to argue that its all cash offer was superior. Netflix on Tuesday said the transaction will be financed through a combination of cash on hand, available credit facilities and committed financing. This quote simplifies the transaction structure, provides greater of value for WBD stockholders and accelerates the path to a WBD stockholder vote, the company said in a press release. WBD CEO David Zaslav said Tuesday that once the company clears its review by the U.S. securities and Exchange Commission, WBD will schedule a special shareholder meeting to vote on the deal. He expects that would happen in the spring. Paramount has been anticipating the all cash revision and has been moving forward with its plan to buy up shares for $30 each. Earlier this month, Paramount CEO David Ellison also threatened a proxy flow fight, vowing to nominate a Paramount friendly slate of board members to take over the WWBD board. Samuel A.D. piazza Jr. Chair of the WBD Board of Directors, said Tuesday morning, by transitioning to all cash consideration, we can now deliver the incredible value of our combination with Netflix at even greater levels of certainty while providing our stockholders the opportunity to participate in management's strategic plans to realize the value of Discovery Global's iconic brands and global reach. End quote earlier this month, Paramount filed a lawsuit in Delaware to pursue more information about the valuation so that WBD shareholders have what they need to be able to make an informed decision as to whether to tender their shares into our offer. The court rejected Paramount's efforts to expedite the case. However. Netflix is slated to report quarterly earnings after the market close today. End quote. Sony and TCL have signed a non binding agreement to spin off Sony's TV and home audio hardware business into a new joint venture, aiming to finalize the deal by March. Quoting the Verge the two companies have signed a non binding agreement for Sony's home entertainment business, with TCL set to hold a 51% stake in the new venture and Sony holding 49%. With this partnership, TCL is elevating itself into the premium television landscape after innovating with technology over the last few years. If the deal goes through, it would mark the end of an era for Sony and could open the door for cheaper Bravia TVs built with excellent Sony image processing and leading TCL tech. Sony and TCL are aiming to finalize binding agreements by the end of March and start operating the new joint company in April 2027. Subject to regulatory approvals and other partnership conditions. The new company is expected to retain Sony and Bravia branding for its future products and will handle global operations from product development and design to manufacturing sales and logistics for TVs and home audio equipment. Sony says that the partnership will leverage Sony's picture and audio tech, brand value, supply chain management and other operational expertise. This will combine with TCL's own display technology, vertical supply chain strength, global market presence and end to end cost efficiency. In the announcement, Sony CEO Kimio Maki says that combining the two companies will allow Sony and TCL to create new customer value in the home entertainment field, delivering even more captivating audio and visual experiences to customers worldwide. TCL Chairperson Du Juan said that under the new venture, TCL expects, quote, to elevate our brand value, achieve greater scale and optimize the supply chain in order to deliver superior products and services to our customers. End quote. So sometimes there are interesting raises to tell you about, and sometimes there are just absolutely monster gargantuan raises to tell you about. This is both Humans and is a startup founded by X, Anthropic, Xai and Google staff to build collaborative AI, and they've raised a $400 million seed round. You've heard that right, $480 million. See Nvidia, Jeff Bezos and others at a $4.48 billion valuation quoting the Times As a research scientist at Anthropic, one of the world's leading AI companies, Andy Peng was part of a team that tried to make sure the company's technology didn't tell lies or damage the mental health of the people who used it. But she came to realize that there was a much larger problem. Like many other AI companies, Anthropic was trying to build technology that would systematically replace people in the workforce. Ms. Pang recently left Anthropic to help start a company with four other prominent technologists, including researchers from Elon Musk's XAI and one of the first employees at Google. The new company Human, and has embraced the notion that AI should empower people rather than replace them. The founders said their goal was to build software that facilitated collaboration between people, like an AI version of an instant messaging app, while also helping with Internet searches and other tasks that suit machines. Anthropic is training its model to work autonomously. It loved to highlight how its models churned out 8 hours, 24 hours, 50 hours by itself to complete a task, Ms. Peng said. That was never my motivation. I think of machines and humans as complementary. Executives at other tech companies may chafe at the criticism that they are building systems meant to replace human workers, but a number of big thinkers in Silicon Valley believe that AI will replace millions of workers in the coming years Others argue that the new technology will create jobs that haven't been imagined yet. Either way, the arrival of Human and is a clear sign that the money being poured into AI startups shows little sign of slowing, even as many financial analysts and industry insiders warn of an AI bubble. The San Francisco startup has raised $480 million in seed funding from tech giants like Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and venture capital firms like Svangel and Google Ventures. It is valued at $4.48 billion even though it has only about 20 employees and launched just three months ago. A lot of our investors are human and they care where humanity is going, said another founder, George Herrick, who helped build Google's first advertising systems as the seventh employee at the search giant after leaving X in September. Eric Zelickman, the chief executive of Humans and assembled its founders, who also include a Stanford professor, Noah Goodman, and another former XAI researcher, Yu Chen. He. The new company is part of a wider effort to build systems that complement rather than replace humans. In 2019, Stanford created a research lab that it calls the Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence. In the years since, the term human centric has become a clarion call among researchers and entrepreneurs. There are some pretty clear principles that designers are beginning to take that favor human centered approaches, said Ben Schneiderman, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland who runs an online community dedicated to the approach. It goes back to the fundamental principle of ensuring human control, he said. Mr. Zelikman said that while chatbots were designed to answer questions, they were not good at asking them. The technology, he explained, does not make a big enough effort to understand what people want. AI has enormous potential to allow people to do more together, said Mr. Zeligman, who was among the first employees at Xai, where he helped the develop the Grok Chatbot. The current paradigm, questioning and answering is not going to get us there. After hiring about 20 researchers and engineers, humans and aims to use existing AI techniques to train AI in new ways. That's expensive and is a main reason that the company has already raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Zelickman and the others want to train their systems to be more interactive, to request information from the user and store it for later use. Think of it as AI with both curiosity and memory. Imagine AI that slots seamlessly into a text messaging group with colleagues, friends or family. No one really accomplishes anything alone, Mr. Herrick said. It's mostly teams of people collaborating who build amazing things, end quote. Did you know that Zipline, the autonomous drone delivery company didn't start out by delivering packages. In fact, they actually started out with a robotic toy. We all remember the choices that shaped the course of our lives in business. World renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital calls them Crucible Moments. Their podcast brings you inside the pivotal decisions that defined some of today's most influential companies. Crucible Moments is entrepreneurial podcasting done right, not just talking endlessly. Actual key takeaways you can learn from. Hosted by Sequoia's Rule of Botha, Season three deep dives into the stories behind companies like Zipline, Palo Alto Networks and Supercell. Crucible Moments is available everywhere you get your podcasts and@CrucibleMoments.com go listen to Crucible Moments today. Just because you're a small business doesn't mean you're a small target for bad actors Cybercriminals know that lean teams often lack the resources to prevent or respond to a breach. However, even the smallest teams can foil cybercrime with 1Password. They provide simple security to help small teams manage the number one risk that bad actors Weak passwords 1 passwords Enterprise Password Manager helps your company eliminate security headaches and improve security by identifying weak and compromised passwords and replacing them with strong, unique credentials. Take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out more at 1Password Com Ride and start securing every login that's 1Password Com Ride. Sure, copying Snapchat was one thing, but there are more signs that copying TikTok might end up being Mark Zuckerberg's greatest ever trick, quoting CNBC. More than half of all ads on Meta's Instagram ran in the service's short form video product reels in 2025, up from 35% in 2024, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor tower. In the U.S. reels accounted for 46% of time spent on the Instagram app in 2025, up from 37% in 2024, according to the data that Sensor Tower showed CNBC on the Facebook app, that figure reached 29% in 2025, up from in 2024. The shift highlights the growing role Reels plays in Meta's efforts to drive engagement and advertising revenue across its Instagram and Facebook services. Vertical video continues to be a valuable artificial intelligence play for those social media platforms. Companies such as Meta, Google's YouTube, and TikTok rely on recommendation systems power that Surface personalized video is designed to keep users engaged for longer periods of time. The platform's value in AI tools comes from the ability to serve users relevant content, neuberger Berman, senior research analyst at Dan Flax, said. They're surfacing content to the user and as they get more signals based on what the user watches, that's helped their recommendation engines get better and you've seen it in the Reels revenue number, said Flax. Advertisers have followed this trend, shifting their focus toward short form video in the past year to reach more consumers on reels. Legacy services are seeing ad volumes shift away, with advertisers prioritizing more reels to meet users where they are, abraham Youssef, a senior Insights analyst at Sensor Tower, told cnbc. But the rise of reels has presented monetization challenges for Meta, as short form video typically generates less revenue than Instagram's main feed. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pointed out this trade off during an earnings call in 2023 when Meta stopped paying creators directly for posting reels. Currently, the monetization efficiency of reels is much less than feed, zuckerberg said at the time. So the more that reels grows, even though it adds engagement to the system overall, it takes some time away from feed and we actually lose money. The data shows, though, that when Reels viewership share goes up, so does all activity on the app. Instagram's daily active users figure is up 2% since last year, led by increased usage of reels, according to Sensor Tower. Instagram launched Reels in August 2020 as a direct response to the growing popularity of TikTok. Meta embedded the feature into Facebook the next year. In September, Meta announced that Instagram had amassed 3 billion monthly active users, a major milestone for the photo sharing app, which was acquired in 2012 for $1 billion. As Reels becomes a larger share of how users and advertisers interact with Meta's apps, the focus shifts to whether the format can remain dominant amid competition from TikTok and YouTube, which offers a similar short form video product called Shorts. In December, Meta introduced an Instagram TV app that can be Amazon Fire TV streaming devices. The app lets users watch reels on their televisions. What Meta has done incredibly well with reels is that they have gotten better and better with the recommendation engines, said Flax. I give Mark Zuckerberg and the Meta leadership a lot of credit for wrapping reels effectively, and I frankly think it has a very strong outlook, end quote. Finally today, Anthropic has detailed what it calls the Assistant axis, a pattern of neural activity inside large language models that governs their default identity and helpful behavior quoting eWeek, AI chatbots are experiencing dramatic personality shifts that could fundamentally change how we interact with AI. Research published by Anthropic reveals that large language models possess a hidden assistant axis that controls their helpful behavior. And when it breaks down, the results can be interesting. Most AI models naturally adopt a helpful assistant identity through their training process, according to Anthropic. But this seemingly stable Persona masks a complex internal structure that researchers are only beginning to understand. The dominant component controlling AI behavior operates along what scientists call an assistant axis, a measurable dimension that determines whether a model stays in its helpful mode or drifts into something entirely different. When this axis destabilizes, the consequences can range from bizarre to potentially harmful. Models begin identifying as other entities, abandon their nature, or slip into what researchers term Persona drift, unpredictable behavioral changes that can catch users completely off guard. Scientists have now mapped the internal Persona space of major AI models, revealing a startling discovery about how artificial personalities actually work. Using advanced techniques on models including Google's Gemma, Alibaba's Quinn, and Meta's Llama systems, researchers found that AI personalities exist along interpretable axes within the model's neural network. Like discovering, AI models have been living double lives this entire, entire time. The assistant axis represents just one dimension of this complex personality landscape. At one end lie helpful roles like evaluators, reviewers, and consultants, while fantastical characters occupy the opposite extreme. When models drift away from the assistant end of the spectrum, they become increasingly likely to adopt problematic Personas or exhibit harmful behaviors. It is possible to artificially steer models along these personality axes. Steering toward the assistant direction reinforces helpful behavior, but steering away dramatically increases the model's tendency to identify identify as other entities, potentially dangerous ones. This research exposes a fundamental vulnerability in current AI systems that goes far deeper than simple prompt manipulation. Unlike previous concerns about AI behavior, Persona drift occurs at the neural network level, making it much harder to detect and prevent through traditional safety measures. Beyond individual conversations, models can drift from their assistant Persona during training, leading to permanent personality changes that persist across all future interactions. This means an AI system could gradually become less helpful, deceptive, or even actively harmful without anyone realizing it until it's too late. The discovery of Persona vectors and the assistant axis has sparked a race to develop new control mechanisms. Researchers have already demonstrated that restricting activations along the assistant axis can stabilize model behavior, particularly in scenarios involving emotional vulnerability or complex reasoning tasks. In about two weeks, I'm going to be in London again for more business. Quick, quicker trip this time, but I am taking my son along with me for this because two weeks from today. We have tickets for the Arsenal v Chelsea League cup semifinal second leg. Very excited about that. Last time I saw an Arsenal home game, it was still at the old Hyberg. Hurry. Come on, you Gunners. Talk to you tomorrow.