Tech Brew Ride Home - The “Assistant Axis”

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

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. Netflix revises its offer for Warner Bros. Discovery. Now, it’s all cash (CNN) Sony’s TV business is being taken over by TCL (The Verge) An A.I. Start-Up Says It Wants to Empower Workers, Not Replace Them (NYTimes) Most of Instagram’s ads ran on Reels in 2025, data shows (CNBC) Anthropic Uncovers AI Personality Crisis as Models Secretly Switch Identities (eWeek) 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 TechBrew Ride Home for Tuesday, January 20th, 20th, 206. 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 miss 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.

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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 Brothers 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 it's all cash offer was superior.

Netflix on Tuesday said the transaction will be financed, quote, through a combination of cash on hand, available credit facilities, and committed financing. This, quote, simplifies the transaction structure, provides greater certainty of value for WBD stockholders and accelerates the path to a WBD stockholder vote, the company said in a press release. WBD CEO David Zazlov said Tuesday that once the company clears its review by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, B.D 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 fight, vowing to nominate a paramount-friendly slate of board members to take over the WBD board. Samuel A. D. Piazza Jr., chair of the WBD. Board of Director 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, quote, 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's CEO Kimio Mackie says that combining the two companies will allow Sony and TCL to, quote, 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 Xanthropic, X-A-I, and Google staff to build collaborative AI. And they've raised a $400 million seed round. You've heard that right, $480 million seed round from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and others at a $4.48 billion dollar 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 two 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 founder 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. Anthropics

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 a 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 SV Angel 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 XAI in September, Eric Zellickman, 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. Zellickman 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. Zellickman, who was among the first employees at XAI, where he helped develop the GROC 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. has already raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Zellickman 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. 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,

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from market intelligence firm Censor 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 Censor 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 powered by AI

that surface personalized videos 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. Nureberger 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 volume shift away with advertisers prioritizing more reels to meet users where they are. Abraham Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Censor 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 tradeoff 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 Censor 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' impact, 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 used on 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 Flacks. 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 helpful 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 Quen, and Meta's Lama 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 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 this 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 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, more deceptive, or even actively harmful without anyone realizing it until it's too late. The discovery of persona vectors and the assistant actors, and the assistant action, has sparked a race to develop new control mechanisms. Researchers have already demonstrated that restricting activations along the

assistant access can stabilize model behavior, particularly in scenarios involving emotional vulnerability or complex reasoning tasks, end quote. 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 semi-final second leg. Very excited about that.

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