Tech’s big story today is Meta’s twin bet on messaging and India: naming CRED founder Kunal Shah to run WhatsApp while reportedly taking a roughly 20% stake in CRED through a $900 million investment. It signals both a leadership reset for one of the world’s biggest chat platforms and a deeper push into fintech-adjacent growth. In AI, two very different futures are coming into focus. Getty Images surged after striking a multi-year deal to place licensed photos inside OpenAI discovery tools, including ChatGPT, underscoring how copyright and trustworthy media are becoming central to AI products. At the other end of the spectrum, new “Anticloud” research sketches a decentralized model for local-first AI, with offline mesh networking and cryptographic audit trails designed to work without centralized infrastructure. And in consumer tech, Amazon is already dangling a record-low $399 AirPods Max 2 deal ahead of Prime Day.