Morning Scan

Earnings season keeps handing out the same lesson: beating estimates isn't enough anymore, guidance is everything. Duolingo, AppLovin and Block all posted solid growth and still got punished or shrugged at after hours. The AI coding-agent pileup continues, and the Google brain drain story just got a very public rebuttal.

372% — Sandisk's Q4 revenue jump YoY, and the stock still dropped on soft guidance. (Djnewswires)

Connected World

AppLovin's 53% growth gets an eye-roll (paywall)

Missed estimates by a hair, in-line guidance, 16% drop after hours — the bar for ad-tech is apparently in orbit. (WSJ)

Block beats, raises guidance, shares slip anyway

Cash App gross profit up 31%, full-year outlook raised, and the market still found something to nitpick. (SiliconANGLE)

SoftBank's Intel and ByteDance stakes are carrying the quarter

Net profit down 18% YoY but still crushed estimates, thanks to an $8.2B Intel gain — portfolio math beating operating math. (CNBC)

Machines & Minds

Meta's Muse Code joins an already crowded field

Differentiation among terminal-based AI coding tools for macOS will come from price or data rather than features. (AppleInsider)

Meta's cheap tier is a data trade, not a discount

Up to 20x cheaper if you let Meta train on your prompts — the actual product here is your usage data. (MacRumors)

DeepSeek is raising prices, a sign the free-lunch era is ending (paywall)

Cheap Chinese model pricing helped set the market floor; that floor is about to move. (Bloomberg)

Google is shopping for an AI coding startup's team, not just its tech

$1.5B for Mechanize looks less like an acquisition and more like an acqui-hire with a very large signing bonus. (SiliconANGLE)

Machines & Minds

Jeff Dean is leaving to start his own lab

Google's Chief Scientist and Gemini co-lead exits for a new venture called Discovery Loop — the timing, right after Hassabis stepped back, is not subtle. (SemiAnalysis)

Gary Marcus says not so fast

A contrarian counter to the "Google is cooked" narrative, arguing the exits matter less than the infrastructure underneath. (Marcus on AI)

OpenAI calls Apple's trade secrets lawsuit "rotten to its core"

The countersuit filing accuses Apple of using litigation to paper over its own AI integration failures — spicy for a legal brief. (The Verge)

“Apple should not be permitted to use a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up for its failures to integrate AI into its products.” — OpenAI court filing, via Axios