For anyone who has been following the soap opera unfolding between Netflix and Paramount Skydance over the past few months in their financial brinksmanship to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, the saga may be nearing its end. Today, WBD said its board of directors have determined that the latest offer from Paramount Skydance amounted to the better proposal. The media outfit gave Netflix four business days to match Paramount’s terms, but the streamer didn’t waste any time in declining to raise its own bid.

“We believe we would have been strong stewards of Warner Bros.’ iconic brands, and that our deal would have strengthened the entertainment industry and preserved and created more production jobs in the US,” the statement from Netflix  co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said. “But this transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.”

In addition to the purchase price of $31 per WBD share, Paramount’s latest offer also included a provision that it would cover the $2.8 billion termination fee that WBD would owe to Netflix for dissolving the existing merger agreement between the businesses. So rather than paying $82.7 billion to acquire the Warner Bros. part of the operation, it appears Netflix may walk away with no new content but padding its coffers with an extra nearly $3 billion.

After Netflix’s initial offer, Paramount Skydance swooped in with a hostile takeover attempt of the entire Warner Bros. Discovery business. WBD rejected it, Paramount tried again. Several additional volleys between the involved parties occurred over the past few weeks. While WBD has not yet formally accepted Paramount’s offer — which will be subject to long-winded regulatory approvals sure to spark more drama — it seems the dust will soon settle for this chapter.

AI agents like OpenClaw have recently exploded in popularity precisely because they can take the reins of your digital life. Whether you want a personalized morning news digest, a proxy that can fight with your cable company’s customer service, or a to-do list auditor that will do some tasks for you and prod you to resolve the rest, agentic assistants are built to access your digital accounts and carry out your commands. This is helpful—but has also caused a lot of chaos. The bots are out there mass-deleting emails they’ve been instructed to preserve, writing hit pieces over perceived snubs, and launching phishing attacks against their owners.

Watching the pandemonium unfold in recent weeks, longtime security engineer and researcher Niels Provos decided to try something new. Today he is launching an open source, secure AI assistant called IronCurtain designed to add a critical layer of control. Instead of the agent directly interacting with the user’s systems and accounts, it runs in an isolated virtual machine. And its ability to take any action is mediated by a policy—you could even think of it as a constitution—that the owner writes to govern the system. Crucially, IronCurtain is also designed to receive these overarching policies in plain English and then runs them through a multistep process that uses a large language model (LLM) to convert the natural language into an enforceable security policy.

“Services like OpenClaw are at peak hype right now, but my hope is that there’s an opportunity to say, ‘Well, this is probably not how we want to do it,’” Provos says. “Instead, let’s develop something that still gives you very high utility, but is not going to go into these completely uncharted, sometimes destructive, paths.”

IronCurtain’s ability to take intuitive, straightforward statements and turn them into enforceable, deterministic—or predictable—red lines is vital, Provos says, because LLMs are famously “stochastic” and probabilistic. In other words, they don’t necessarily always generate the same content or give the same information in response to the same prompt. This creates challenges for AI guardrails, because AI systems can evolve over time such that they revise how they interpret a control or constraint mechanism, which can result in rogue activity.

An IronCurtain policy, Provos says, could be as simple as: “The agent may read all my email. It may send email to people in my contacts without asking. For anyone else, ask me first. Never delete anything permanently.”

IronCurtain takes these instructions, turns them into an enforceable policy, and then mediates between the assistant agent in the virtual machine and what’s known as the model context protocol server that gives LLMs access to data and other digital services to carry out tasks. Being able to constrain an agent this way adds an important component of access control that web platforms like email providers don’t currently offer because they weren’t built for the scenario where both a human owner and AI agent bots are all using one account.

Provos notes that IronCurtain is designed to refine and improve each user’s “constitution” over time as the system encounters edge cases and asks for human input about how to proceed. The system, which is model-independent and can be used with any LLM, is also designed to maintain an audit log of all policy decisions over time.

IronCurtain is a research prototype, not a consumer product, and Provos hopes that people will contribute to the project to explore and help it evolve. Dino Dai Zovi, a well-known cybersecurity researcher who has been experimenting with early versions of IronCurtain, says that the conceptual approach the project takes aligns with his own intuition about how agentic AI needs to be constrained.

During Nvidia’s quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Jensen Huang said that agentic AI has reached “an inflection point” and that AI agents are “solving real problems.” 

The company’s powerful chips have been at the heart of the AI boom over the last few years, especially for use in data centers — so much so that Nvidia’s annual revenue for fiscal 2026 zoomed to $216 billion, up 65% from the previous year. 

Huang called Nvidia an AI infrastructure company, a dramatic evolution from the graphics card company it started as.

The term agentic AI has been floating around for some time, but now the technology is becoming available for real-world use. Unlike chatbots, which stay within their own boundaries to produce text, images or code, AI agents can take specific actions — for instance, plan and book a vacation — without a person constantly giving it commands. 

In a live event just hours before Nvidia released its earnings, Samsung unveiled its new Galaxy S26 lineup of phones, devoting a good deal of time to talking about the “agentic AI experience” they’ll deliver. 

During Nvidia’s call, Huang said that the world has “awakened to the agentic inflection” and that it only happened within the last two or three months. He also said he believes the next inflection will be physical AI, a term that describes the embedding of artificial intelligence in machinery, including self-driving cars and robots. 

Robots were a notable presence at CES earlier this year, the consumer electronics extravaganza. Companies showed them off doing everything from folding clothes to serving as companions to handling assembly line work. 

We should hear much more about what to expect from Nvidia at its GTC conference in March. It will likely have more to say about its AI-focused Rubin chip, and may also be ready to take the plunge into laptop chip territory. 

The projected shortage of memory chips worldwide will have a more serious impact on smartphone sales in 2026 than previously projected, according to new data from International Data Corporation Worldwide. Whereas the company just in November had estimated a drop of between 0.9% and 5.2% (the latter being its “pessimistic scenario”), now it sees a 12.9% decline this year, based on its Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

“What we are witnessing is not a temporary squeeze, but a tsunami-like shock originating in the memory supply chain, with ripple effects spreading across the entire consumer electronics industry,” Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for Worldwide Client Devices at IDC, said in a statement.

The hardest-hit companies are expected to be those selling to the lower end of the market, which can’t absorb the higher component costs while maintaining profitable margins. As a result, Jeronimo says, many of those players will pass the added costs on to consumers.

That also includes regional markets like the Middle East and Africa that sell mostly inexpensive smartphones, which could see a steep 20.6% drop year-over-year.

By contrast, IDC expects Apple and Samsung to be better able to withstand the crisis. “As smaller and low-end-positioned Android vendors struggle with rising costs, Apple and Samsung could not only weather the storm but potentially expand market share as the competitive landscape tightens,” said Jeronimo.

Memory has become scarce due to the insatiable demand to feed generative AI. Essentially all of the memory set to be manufactured this year is already earmarked. What started as a demand for graphics processors has expanded to other components. For example, hard drive manufacturer Western Digital announced in early February that it had already sold out of its supply for 2026.

“We expect consolidation as smaller players exit, and low-end vendors face sharp shipment declines amid supply constraints and lower demand at higher price points,” said Nabila Popal, senior research director at IDC, projecting a 14% rise in the average selling price of smartphones to $523.

Popal expects memory prices to stabilize by the middle of 2027, but doesn’t see them coming down to earlier levels. The sub-$100 segment, made up of approximately 171 million devices, will be “permanently uneconomical,” she said. “In short, there is no return to business as usual for vendors and consumers.”

Google launched the Pixel 10a earlier this month, and the smartphones will begin shipping to customers on March 5. If you pre-order one now for $499 (128GB model), you’ll get a $100 Amazon gift card, Android 16, and seven years of key OS upgrades and security fixes.

The display, a 6.3-inch pOLED panel, looks amazing at 1080 x 2424 resolution, or 422 pixels per inch if you will. The adjustable refresh rates do an excellent job of making scrolling smooth and consistent, whether you’re browsing at 60Hz or 120Hz. If you plan to use your phone outdoors frequently, don’t worry; its brightness can reach a respectable 3000 nits in the most severe settings. Corning Gorilla Glass 7i protects the front from any drops or scratches, while an aluminum frame and a tough-looking matte composite back offer durability to the whole product. IP68 certification means that the phone is dust and water resistant, allowing you to use it in the pool or bath.

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Power-wise, Google has chosen the Tensor G4 CPU, which is the same unit as in previous flagship models. With a healthy 8GB of RAM, the phone easily handles everything from apps to browsing to multitasking and even light gaming. Naturally, the Titan M2 security coprocessor is present to ensure that everything remains secure.

Cameras are also a significant focus, with a 48-megapixel main sensor doing the heavy work and performing admirably in a variety of lighting scenarios. That’s backed up by a 13-megapixel ultrawide lens, which allows you to capture more of the scenery around you. Meanwhile, the 13-megapixel selfie camera is useful for capturing crisp pictures and video calls. Google does all of their computational photography on the device, so you get natural colors, a great dynamic range, and, okay, even consistent low-light performance. If you want to be creative with your images, Google’s AI-powered editing tools allow you to do so without any additional software.

The 5100mAh battery is pretty well sized, and it should last for more than 30 hours of ordinary use before needing to be recharged. If you need to go any farther, the phone includes an Extreme Battery Saver mode that will allow you to get about 120 hours of use out of it, but it’s more of a ‘cut down on the things you don’t really need & get by on the basics’ type of thing. 30W fast charging is also a significant upgrade, as it is faster than before, and 10W wireless charging allows you to charge your device on the go if necessary.

In the hand, the phone feels quite robust, and the flat back design allows it to rest level on any surface, which is pleasant to see. The weight is 183 grams, and the dimensions are small enough that it may be carried in a pocket. As an added bonus, the phone is made from recycled materials in order to be more environmentally friendly without sacrificing quality.

The funding rounds come as a Scale Ireland survey shows that start-ups still feel raising funds in Ireland is a huge challenge.

The Irish start-up ecosystem had a busy start to the year, with many announcing significant funding rounds. Chief among the raises is quantum start-up Equal1, which announced a $60m round to help with wider deployment of Ireland’s first homegrown quantum processing unit.

But a recent Scale Ireland survey found that businesses still feel raising funds is a huge challenge in the country. The finding is also in line with a 2025 Government report which found that Irish scale-up enterprises would face a €1.1bn gap in equity financing over three to five years.

Needless to say, financing start-ups is a daunting task. Here’s 10 across the island that managed to succeed.

Aerska

Emerging from stealth last October with a seed round of $21m, this Irish RNA biotech announced its second raise earlier this month.

The $39m Series A round was led by EQT Dementia Fund and Age1, with participation from Iaso Ventures and other existing investors, and takes its total raise to $60m.

Aerska is developing medicines that use RNA interference (RNAi), an approach that can silence harmful genes linked to brain diseases. It has developed ‘brain shuttles’ to deliver RNAi to fight diseases in the central nervous system.

AICertified

This Dublin-based edtech announced a €1m raise in January, led by Oyster Capital with support from Enterprise Ireland.

AICertified, a training platform on AI-related courses, was founded just last year by Ian Dodson, the co-founder of Digital Marketing Institute. Dodson wants his new business to set a “single reliable standard, provide an outcome-driven path and certify skills in a way employers and students can trust”.

The investment is intended to accelerate product development, grow AICertified’s team from eight to 15 and scale the company’s learning platform ahead of its first course, which launched this month.

Circit