Acqui-Investing

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.

• Meta invests $900M into Indian fintech Cred for a ~20% stake, and plans to appoint Cred founder Kunal Shah as the leader of WhatsApp, replacing Will Cathcart (Bloomberg)
• The departure of John Jumper, a key member of Google's AI coding development team, further strains Google's efforts to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI (Bloomberg)
• Getty signs a licensing deal with OpenAI, letting its image library appear in ChatGPT's search and discovery features; GETY jumps 150%+ pre-market (Bloomberg)
• JD.com founder Richard Liu says robots will replace the company's 700K delivery workers "sooner or later", and it will help retrain them in robot maintenance (FT)
• Toto, Japan's largest toilet maker, plans to invest $495M by 2030 to expand its semiconductor materials unit, targeting R&D for next-gen 1nm chip production (Nikkei Asia)
• Japanese toilet maker Toto plans $496M push into chip tech (Tech in Asia)
• A look at "humanizer" and "autotyper" apps that help students evade AI-detection software by slowly auto-typing essays and making AI text sound less robotic (The New York Times)
• A speculative scenario titled "Europe 2031" projects economic and political instability in the EU if it fails to keep pace with the US and China in the AI race (The Guardian)

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