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Meta poured $900M into India's Cred and tapped founder Kunal Shah to run WhatsApp. Google lost Nobel winner John Jumper to Anthropic. Getty soared on an OpenAI deal, JD.com warned robots would replace its couriers, and Toto pivoted toward chips.
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Welcome to the Tech We Write home for Monday, June 22, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Meta poured $900 million into an Indian startup to acqui hire the founder to run WhatsApp. Google lost Nobel winner John Jumper to anthropic. Getty soared on an OpenAI deal. JD.com warned robots would replace its couriers and the pivot from toilets to chips. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. I'm getting to the age where I might pull a muscle just by thinking about stretching. That's why Blueprint's longevity mix has been such a game changer. Blueprint was started by Brian Johnson, more popularly known as the don't die Guy. His latest endeavor in living longer and aging better led him to create Blueprint. With just one scoop. You'll get support for energy, cognitive performance, mood focus, sleep, cellular resil, healthy aging, science backed, precision dosed and no BS for a limited time only. Our listeners get 20% off plus free shipping at blueprint.bryanjohnson.com by using code TBRH at checkout. That's code TBRH@blueprint.brianjohnson.com for 20% off. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you some bold name musical chairs for you Today. Meta is investing $900 million into Indian fintech startup Cred for around a 20% stake and plans to appoint CRED founder Kunal Shah as the leader of WhatsApp, replacing Will Cathcart. So this is basically an acqui hire or I guess an investa hire. Quoting Bloomberg, Shah will replace the current head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart, who has been running the popular messaging service for roughly seven years. Cathcart, who saw WhatsApp's user Bas Grace more than double in size during his tenure, is staying at Meta, but will step into a new role using artificial intelligence tools to develop consumer apps and products. A Meta spokesperson declined to share details about Cathcart's next project. The investment represents a new chapter for WhatsApp, which is one of the world's largest messaging platforms the app has grown considerably in recent years, surpassing 3 billion monthly users in 2025, though it's still early and developing several new business lines, including advertising and subscriptions. Building out those revenue streams, as well as integrating AI agents into WhatsApp, will now fall to Shah, CRED's 47 year old founder. Shah was recruited by Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, who was seeking an entrepreneur from a country where WhatsApp already has a strong foothold. Cox called Shah one of India's most respected entrepreneurs, a serious thinker and a deeply good person, according to a statement shared by a Meta spokesperson. Shah currently lives in Bangalore but will relocate to the Bay Area to work out of Meta's Menlo Park, California headquarters, the spokesperson asked. Meta has employed this investment recruitment strategy before to fill out key leadership roles within the company. Last year, the company invested over $14 billion into Scale AI and recruited its founder Alexander Wang to take over Meta's newly created AI lab. Founded in 2018, CRED offers consumers perks and rewards tied to their credit card repayments. Its App, which has 17 million monthly users, can also analyze and track spending, according to its website. The company raised $75 million last year in a Series G funding round led by Singapore's Sovereign Wealth Fund, according to IBS Intelligence. As part of its investment, Meta will provide both primary and secondary capital, according to the press release, meaning it will purchase shares from some of CRED's existing investors. Shah will join Meta full time, stepping away from cred, though he will remain a shareholder. Mittin Sampat, an executive leading company strategy, will take over as interim CEO while The board reviews CRED's leadership structure with an eye toward an eventual IPO, the press release said now quoting Gokul Rajaran on x the Meta's hiring of Kunal to run WhatsApp is almost unprecedented in their bringing a leader from outside Silicon Valley to run a global product. And this wasn't a straightforward hire either. Meta is paying $1 billion for the privilege of hiring him. The only comparable I can think of among tech companies is Apple hiring Angela Arentz, CEO of Burberry, to run retail. Other than that, hire every product Business leadership role at the best tech companies has been fil from people in the Valley, if not the US. This is a great win for WhatsApp users who will benefit from a leader who has a native and deep understanding of and facility with the product. Meta who gets one of the best global consumer product thinkers and builders for their crown jewel product, the Indian Global Product Talent Ecosystem which will be inspired by seeing that you don't need to be in Silicon Valley to lead a global product. That forward thinking tech AI companies will stretch to get the best leaders from anywhere in the world. And Google has lost another one. John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize for protein structure prediction, says he is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. Lots of people are saying that the recent departures of talent from Google might put strain on Gemini's efforts to compete with ChatGPT and Claude, quoting Bloomberg employees and executives at DeepMind have also raised concerns in recent months that the company doesn't have a clear solution for businesses seeking AI coding tools, which have become a key focus of Anthropic and OpenAI and has driven both companies momentum in recent months. Jumper won the chemistry Nobel alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for creating an AI model that can predict the structure of proteins called AlphaFold. Thanks John for an extraordinary partnership and wonderful collaboration over the past nine years, Hassabis wrote. On X. What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity. Jumper is leaving DeepMind after one of Google's most prominent researchers, Noam Shazir, also left for OpenAI. Shazir co authored a seminal paper that helped catalyze the AI boom. His departure from Google marked a big win for OpenAI as it competes with Anthropic to develop ever more sophisticated models before their initial public offerings. End quote. Getty, also known as Getty Images, has signed a licensing deal with OpenAI, letting its image library appear in ChatGPT's search and discovery features. Getty Stock was up 115% at the time of this writing. Quoting Bloomberg on Sunday, Getty said in a statement that images from its library will appear in the search and discovery features of ChatGPT, making a key reversal for the firm. The companies did not share financial terms or disclose any details over whether Getty's images would be used to train future OpenAI models. The Getty stock had fallen about 55% this year to close at $0.61 on Friday. The stock photo company's shares have plunged over fears that OpenAI and other artificial intelligence developers will poach its business. AI can produce realistic images and and the companies behind the tools have repeatedly clashed with photographers and creators whose work helped train their technology. Initially, Getty resisted the technology. It tried developing its own AI image generator and had sued Stability AI, a developer of another popular tool. OpenAI has cut a number of licensing deals with news publishers and media firms as the ChatGPT creator expands into areas like video creation and advertising. In May, Getty reported first quarter sales that missed expectations. The company is still waiting for approval to buy rival Shutterstock in a $3.7 billion deal. JD.com founder Richard Liu says robots will replace the company's 700,000 delivery workers sooner or later and that JD will help retrain them in robot maintenance. Quoting the FT, the head of one of China's biggest e commerce groups has warned that its 700,000 delivery workers will be replaced by robots sooner or later, underlining the threat from rapid automation to the country's already strained employment market. Richard Liu, founder and chair of JD.com said the company had signed contracts with about 120 schools to retrain its army of couriers for new work, such as repairing and maintaining robots. In the future, when robots are delivering parcels, sooner or later there will be a day when couriers are basically no longer needed, leo told the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO forum in Beijing on Sunday. It will definitely be robots delivering parcels, but I really do not want over our 700,000 brothers to go without meals, without jobs. Liu did not forecast when robot deliveries would become widespread in China. However, a number of pilot projects are underway, including airport food delivery robots that take meals to passengers at gates, and others that can ride commuter trains to restock convenience stores, Chinese media have reported. The comments tap into growing concern among policymakers that China's rapid adoption of robots is threatening the jobs of the economy's most vulnerable workers. The number of gig workers in China, temporary employees doing mostly blue collar jobs such as factory work, ride hailing drivers or deliveries will reach 320 million this year, compared with 200 million five years ago, according to the China New Employment Forums research center. Gig workers make up about 40% of all urban areas employment in China. The threat to blue collar jobs from robots and to white collar positions from AI comes as the government reported youth unemployment at 16.3% in April. Liu said robot repair jobs would become common. Quote because robots are machinery, they will always at some point have faults, he said. Technology should make human life become better and work more interesting rather than take away human beings right to work. JD.com is one of China's largest online retailers, competing with Chinese groups Alibaba and Meituan, and operates the Joy Buy platform in the uk, France, Germany and other European countries. 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if you can pivot your shoe company to AI, I guess you can do the same with your toilet company. Toto, Japan's largest toilet manufacturer, says it plans to invest $495 million by 2030 to expand its semiconductor materials unit, targeting R and D for next gen 1nm chip production. Quoting tech in Asia, the move expands a business Toto has been in since the 1980s, making electrostatic chunks, ceramic aerosol deposition films and other advanced ceramics for chipmaking equipment. Electrostatic chunks hold silicon wafers in place with electrostatic force during chipmaking steps such as lithography and etching. Ceramic films are used in equipment that needs durability, heat resistance and specific electrical properties. The 1 nm target is a longer term goal rather than a current mass production milestone, the source said. The most advanced mass produced process today is TSMC's 2 nanometer CTO. Ryosuke Hayashi said semiconductor related capital expenditure is expected to account for more than half of Toto's total spending in the coming years. He also said profits from Toto's newer semiconductor division have surpassed those of its bathroom equipment business. Following the announcement, Toto shares rose more than 10% on June 22. Well, you knew someone would have to come out with these eventually. Quoting the Times Humanizers are apps that rewrite AI produced text to make it sound less robotic, formulaic and trite. Autotypers slowly drip words and sentences into documents, making it appear as if papers were typed at a human pace when in fact they were produced by AI. They even fabricate typos, deletions and revisions. Both tools can help students evade software designed to detect AI. Colleges and K12 schools are trying to keep up with AI detection becoming a significant expense. But educators attempting to restrict the technology, worried about students failing to develop basic skills, are often lagging in what tech industry leaders are calling a detection arms race. In some cases, the very same companies selling detection tools are also making apps that allow students to cheat, including by writing papers for them or rephrasing text written by others. The apps promise to help them avoid accusations of misconduct by scanning their work before they submit it, allowing them to rewrite passages identified as AI. Even honest students are often willing to fork over $10 to $20 per month for premium tools, since AI detectors sometimes flag legitimate work. In one TikTok video, Carter Smith, a young tech influencer known as Carter PCs, gleefully shows viewers how an autotyping and humanizing app called Grubby AI can make it seem like a person naturally wrote an essay that was in fact produced by ChatGPT. Mr. Smith has an enormous following of six and a half million TikTok users. The video is not labeled an ad, though Mr. Smith had previously identified himself as a paid partner of Grubby AI. The app. Mr. Smith and the talent agency that represents him, Rakugo Media, did not respond to interview requests. Autotypers are a response to the fact that many teachers and professors now check a document's version history for signs of AI use. If 1000 words suddenly appeared in a Word or Google document at 11:59pm it it could mean the student pasted in text produced by a chatbot. Grubby AI and its many competitors are finding ways around those systems. DripWriter's website says the app provides believable typos and fixes along with background autotyping, so your essay keeps working when you step away. Dewey AI, an app that describes itself as the number one autotyper for Google Docs, tells customers that when they're too tired or busy to focus or out with friends, the document looks like you wrote it. End quote. And back to the geopolitical beat for all of this A speculative scenario titled Europe 2031 is projecting economic and political instability in the EU if the EU fails to keep pace with the US and China in the AI race. Quoting the Guardian in the heady week of G7 talks that followed, this scenario has gone viral, feeding a feverish discussion of the urgency for EU tech sovereignty. It has been read by members of the European Parliament and say its authors, was brought up in track 1.5 discussions between British and German officials earlier this week. It lays out like this the Americans spend huge sums on a massive AI building program. The scenario highlights a real life $100 billion deal between OpenAI and Nvidia, the $300 billion agreement between OpenAI and Oracle, and bulldozers breaking Earth in Texas for an AI data center. Europeans, meanwhile in this scenario, put forward a tepid investment package and ignore advisors pleas for a full regulatory carte blanche for data center providers. In a matter of years, America monopolizes 70% of the world's compute the semiconductor chips that fill the data centers that power AI models. Europe's economy is meanwhile gasping for air, mostly because its companies have not adopted AI. As AI powered cyber attacks shred European firms and unemployment surges, EU officials scramble to parlay their one last bargaining chip, the Dutch lithography firm asml, which is vital to the production of AI semiconductors into concessions from Beijing or Washington. But it's too late. The US deploys powerful Frontier AI software and learns the deepest fears of AI officials and also which of them are having affairs. The authors of Europe 2031 think that the solution to all of this is data centers. Europe needs to build more, faster, and ideally in AI zones, where matters such as power and planning can be streamlined and deregulated. Brussels politicians who read the piece may take away a simpler message. The scenario has crystallized a conversation about the need for Europe to have technological sovereignty. This scenario, Europe 2031 I believe that some of the parts they mentioned can happen, says Nicolas Cesares, a member of the European Parliament from Spain. But I think they are increasing a bit the alarms in order to call our attention. The US cutting off Europe's access to Fable, he says, means that the EU needs to ask itself harder questions about who is building its AI infrastructure and who will benefit from it. What is the added value of having OpenAI or anthropic data centers in Europe? He says. We are buying a narrative that we need a lot of data centers not to lose the race for AI, but this is crazy. We are paving the way for infrastructure that they will use and sometimes not allow us the possibility of using it. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Athletic Brewing Company crafts award winning non
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