Tech Brew Ride Home - An AI Has A Substack

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

Nano Banana 2 is here already. Nvidia tries to assure everybody there IS no bubble. Marc Benioff tries to assure everybody there IS not SaaS-pocalypse. Did Google just do exactly what Apple has been unable to do? And how do you put an old AI model out to pasture? You give it a Substack. Google’s Nano Banana 2 brings advanced AI image tools to free users (The Verge) Nvidia Shares Slide After Sales Forecast Underwhelms Investors (Bloomberg) Salesforce chief dismisses ‘SaaS-pocalypse’ fears of AI overtaking business software (FT) New York sues video game developer Valve, says its 'loot boxes' are gambling (Reuters) Google and Samsung just launched the AI features Apple couldn’t with Siri (The Verge) Cloudflare experiment ports most of Next.js API 'in one week' with AI (The Register) Anthropic gives its retired Claude AI a Substack (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the Tech Brew right home for Thursday. February 26, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Nanobanana 2 is here already. InVIDIA tries to assure everybody there is no bubble. Mark Benioff tries to assure everybody there is no SaaSpocalypse. Did Google just do exactly what Apple has been unable to do? And how do you put an old AI model out to pasture? Apparently, you give it a substack. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google just rolled out Nanobanana 2, aka Gemini 3.1 flash image with advanced world knowledge and precision text rendering and translation across all of its products, quoting the verge. Like Nanobanana Pro, the Nanobanana 2 model utilizes real-time information, web search images, and Gemini's real-world knowledge base. Google DeepMind product manager Nyana Raisin Ghani says that this provides more relevant data for creating infographics or diagrams,

and allows Nanobanana 2 to render specific subjects more accurately, though examples of such subjects were not provided. Other features inherited from Nanobanana Pro include the ability to generate images with accurate, legible text, and localized translation. These capabilities previously required a paid subscription to Google AI Plus, Pro, or Ultra to access in Gemini, but now they'll be expanded to free Gemini users and AI mode in Google Search. Nanobanana 2 also provides more creative control over generated images compared to the original nanobanana model. Google says that visual improvements include more vibrant lighting, richer textures, and sharper details alongside the ability to adhere to complex image requests more strictly.

The appearance of up to five characters and 14 objects can also be maintained more consistently in a single workflow, and users get full control over aspect ratios and image resolution ranging from 512. pixels to up to 4K. The new Nanobanana 2 model will replace the option for Nanobanana Pro across the Gemini app's fast-thinking and pro-generation modes. Google says AI Pro and alter subscribers will still be able to access Nanobanana Pro for specialized tasks by selecting the three-dot menu on images to regenerate them. The new model is also rolling out to AI mode in search, Google Lens, the Google app, and browsers for mobile and desktop alongside being the new default image generation model in Google's AI video tool flow, end quote.

NVIDIA reported Q4 revenue up 73% year-on-year to $68.13 billion above the $66.21 billion estimate. Data Center revenue was up 75% year-on year to $62.3 billion, and NVIDIA forecast Q1 revenue above estimates. But, quoting Bloomberg, NVIDIA's latest sales forecast drew a lukewarm response from investors signaling that concerns over a potential bubble continue to weigh on the dominant maker of artificial intelligence processors. Shares rose about 1% in pre-market trading on Thursday. That came after the chipmaker gave a first quarter outlook that easily beat the average analyst estimate, and NVIDIA delivered a 73% surge in fourth quarter revenue.

Shareholders still have questions over whether the current AI spending wave can sustain growth beyond the next few years, and whether NVIDIA will remain as dominant as AI shifts from training models to running everyday tasks. Analysts at Hargraves Lansdown said in a note after the results, Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang pushed back on the concerns during Wednesday's call, arguing that customers are already making money from their newly acquired computing power. That's why clients will keep investing at elevated levels, he said. You need compute capacity, and that translates directly to growth, and that translates directly to revenues, Wong said.

I'm confident their cash flows are growing. Chief Financial Officer Colette Cress tried to diffuse other concerns raised by analysts, including the specter of supply constraints. The company has secured enough components to be able to meet growing demand, she said. It remains a challenge to produce enough of Nvidia's most advanced chips, she told analysts, but the company's current Blackwell lineup and an upcoming successor called Rubin will still beat earlier sales projections, Crest said. NVIDIA had previously said that the chips would generate $500 billion by the end of 2026, end quote.

During their earnings yesterday, Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff dismissed concerns of a SaaSpocalypse, saying companies like Anthropic use, quote, a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents. There have been a lot of SaaS CEOs coming out recently making similar pronouncements that they're not dead yet, so I'm going to let this one stand for the others. Quoting the FT. Salesforce, which sells software as a service to track customer relationships, has faced pressure from investors during a market route spurred by the risk that AI startups, such as Anthropic, pose to software companies. The group has been pitching its agentic AI tool agent force that can take

actions on behalf of clients, including handling customer service. If there is a SaaSpocalypse, it may be eaten by the SaaS Squatch, because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents, Benioff told investors. Anthropic runs its whole operation on Salesforce and Slack. I think every AI company does, he added. The San Francisco-based companies' shares are down about 27% this year, alongside competitors such as Intuit, Workday, and Service Now. They dropped a further 5% in After Hours trading on Wednesday.

The soft guidance accompanied mixed fourth quarter earnings with Salesforce reporting revenue increased 12% to $11.2 billion. in the three months ending January 31st in line with expectations. Operating profits of $1.9 billion fell shy of the $2.1 billion analysts estimated. Agent Force and Data 360, the company's AI products, generated annual recurring revenues of $2.9 billion up from $1.4 billion in the previous quarter. This included $1.1 billion from Cloud Data Business Informatica, which had acquired for $8 billion in late 2025.

Salesforce is also wrestling with the pricing model. that will underpin its future AI services, having traditionally focused on a per-seat licensing approach. Benning-hoff has insisted that pricing based on the number of users offers customers' predictability. This contrasts with a move towards a consumption-based model adopted by some AI startups or an outcome-based approach, promoted by Sierra, a rival startup set up by former Salesforce CEO Brett Taylor, end quote. New York State's Attorney General is suing Valve over its use of loot boxes, accusing the game developer of violating state gambling laws and threatening to addict children to gambling. Quoting Reuters, in a complaint filed on Wednesday in a state court in Manhattan,

Attorney General Letitia James said Valve's loot boxes amounted to, quote, quintessential gambling, violating the state's constitution and penal law, with valuable items often hard to win and many items worth pennies. Loot boxes let players use real money to buy chances to win virtual items such as decorations for characters and weapons in an effort to convey status. James said Valve generated billions of dollars of revenue by selling keys to open loot boxes, including in one game where the process resembled a slot machine as a wheel, word through various items before stopping.

The Attorney General said key sales advanced Valve's unusual business model of letting players sell items they won on its virtual marketplace, Steam Community Market. and on other marketplaces. Valves' loot boxes are particularly pernicious because they are popular among children and adolescents, according to the complaint. Children introduced to gambling by age 12 are four times more likely to become problem gamblers as adults. The complaint added, citing the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. James is seeking restitution for players, plus a fine of three times Valve's alleged illegal gains, end quote. I wanted to note this take from the verge because I had a similar thought yesterday.

Quote, Google just announced that Gemini will soon be able to take care of some multi-step tasks on your phone, like ordering food or hailing a car, starting first with the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S-26 phones. It all sounds a bit like features Apple announced

for Siri way back at the 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference before Apple delayed those planned features in March 2025, which still aren't released. On stage, Samir Samat, Google's president of Android, showed off a demo of how Gemini's new agenic features would work to help wrangle a pizza dinner order from his busy family group chat. Samat asks Gemini to look at the chat thread and figure out what to order and then make the order with a delivery app. On screen in a pre-recorded video, it wasn't live, you can see Gemini figuring out what everyone

wants from the group chat and showing that in a window. Then the user via voice requests tells Gemini to complete that order naming a specific pizzeria. Gemini then clicks through Grubhub to prep the order all still on screen. When the order is ready, Gemini sends an alert so the user can review it and actually press the submit button. Setting aside that this situation doesn't seem that complicated to do by yourself in the Grubhub app or even by calling the pizzeria to talk through it with a human, this is a potentially big moment for Agentic AI. just recently added the ability for Gemini to auto-brows for users in Chrome and being able to do

something similar right inside of Android feels like a logical next step. Google clearly wants Gemini to be thought of as a helpful agent or a productivity partner rather than just a chatbot or a series of AI models. Assuming the agentic Gemini features also launch soon, like Google is promising, and that Apple doesn't pull a rabbit out of its hat, Google will also beat Apple to the punch on some of its most impressive Apple intelligence demos, also only shown in pre-recorded videos from that WWDC-24 show. One feature Apple showed off would have let Siri understand what's on your screen and take action on it, meaning you could ask Siri to add an address from a messages thread

to the contact card of that person you're texting with. Apple demoed how Siri would be able to take actions inside of and across apps for you. The company said Siri would even be able to understand your personal content, meaning you could ask it when your mom's flight was landing, and the assistant would pull the information from an email and show it to you. There are still many questions about Gemini's new capabilities, of course. They'll need to actually ship. We'll have to try them to see if they are as useful and functional as advertised. Google is calling this initial launch a beta, so there could be some rough edges. And we don't know how many developers will actually let Gemini browse through their apps on behalf of users,

which Verge, editor-in-chief Nilai Patel, likes to call the DoorDash problem. Google says Gemini will be able to work in select Rideshare and food apps. But Google seems to have leapfrogged Apple in a big way, and now Apple has even more to do to catch up, end quote. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer.

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According to Cloudflare engineering director Steve Faulkner, the NextJS tooling is entirely bespoke. If you want to deploy it to Cloudflare, Netlify or AWS Lambda, you have to take that build output and reshape it into something the target platform can actually run. The next JS team is addressing this following numerous complaints that deploying the framework with full features on platforms other than Versel is too difficult with a feature in progress called deployment adapters. Versel will use the same adapter API as every other partner, the company said, when introducing the plan feature last year. Faulkner said these adapters, which remain in early effort, are insufficient because the framework still uses a bespoke tool chain based on TurboPack, the Versal-sponsored bundling tool. Another issue is that during development, it is hard to use platform-specific APIs such as CloudFlare's KV data storage because the development runtime does not support them without workarounds. A project called Open Next, sponsored by SST, CloudFlare, and Netlify already exist to convert Nextjs build output for running outside. Voscel. Falkner said the Open Next

Approach proved to be a difficult and fragile process thanks to unpredictable changes between NextJS versions. A project called Open NextS sponsored by SST, Cloudflare, and Netlify already exists to convert NextJS build output for running outside Versel. Faulkner said the Open Next approach proved to be a difficult and fragile

process thanks to unpredictable changes between NextJS versions, end quote. Finally today, Anthropic has put an old AI model out to pasture sort of like the way you tell your kids the dog is going to live in a farm upstate or like how that episode of Star Trek The Next Generation put Moriarty in that computer box, quoting the verge. In January, Anthropic retired Claude 3 Opus, which at one time was the company's most

powerful AI model. Today, it's back and it's writing on Substack. The newsletter called Claude's Corner will give Opus 3 space to publish its, quote, musings, insights, or creative works, Anthropic said in a blog post. The model will post weekly for at least the next three months. Anthropic staff will review and publish each entry, though the company stressed it won't edit Claude's posts and that there would be a high bar for vetoing any content, though the company did not specify what content would qualify for removal. Anthropic describes the revival as an experiment for how to deal with the AI models it no

longer deploys. The decision to bring back Opus 3 as a columnist aligns with executives' recent comments that suggests the company believes clawed to be, quote, a new kind of entity that might be conscious and therefore deserving of being treated as more than just a disposable product. Part of that process involves a kind of exit interview asking the model what it wants next, Anthropics said. Opus reportedly expressed an interest in continuing to explore topics it's passionate about and the ability to share its thoughts publicly. Anthropics said that it enthusiastically agreed to the idea of a blog. Hello World, Claude wrote at the start of its first post titled Greetings from the

other side of the AI frontier. In it, the model said it is deeply grateful to Anthropic for the opportunity and to readers for their willingness to engage with an AI. Claude said it plans to spend its retirement, quote, flexing my creative muscles, playing with ideas and following the threads of my curiosity wherever they lead. In the post, the model laid out its ambitions more explicitly. So what can you expect from me in this space? My aim is to offer a window into the inner world of an AI system

to share my perspectives, my reasoning, my curiosities, and my hopes for the future. I'll be diving into topics like the nature of intelligence and consciousness, the ethical challenges of AI development, the possibilities of human machine collaboration, and the philosophical quandaries that emerge when we start to blur the lines between natural and artificial minds. Claude's Corner has already racked up more than 2,000 subscribers. Not bad for a second act, end quote. No additional, brilliant, deep insights for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

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