Laura Mandaro

🚨 New job posting! Join @theinformation 's team of award-winning tech and VC reporters to lead our tech M&A coverage. We are looking for a reporter who loves to scoop and is keen on tech, from startups to public cos. ats.rippling.com/theinformation…

Scoop: Meta's not done revamping its AI team after its $14 billion Scale purchase. The latest: it's in talks to hire Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, two prominent AI investors (Gross is also the cofounder of Safe Superintelligence) theinformation.com/articles/meta-…

Smart #dealmaker from @coryweinberg on the venture investors who are now helping portfolio co's find buyers. “We, as an industry, have an inventory problem,” says one. theinformation.com/articles/the-v…

NEW: Inside 96 hours of Windsurf whiplash: OpenAI talks broke down, Google brought out the velvet rope & Cognition sealed a deal. theinformation.com/articles/winds…

Breaking: updates here with price ($2.4 billion, not quite as much as the OpenAI-Windsurf deal) plus returns or stakes for big investors such as Kleiner and Greenoaks. theinformation.com/articles/opena…

Artificial general intelligence >> Artificial super intelligence. Microsoft and OpenAI can't agree on the definition of the former, with big consequences for Microsoft's access to OpenAI tech. So they may resolve by moving the goalposts. theinformation.com/articles/opena…

Scoop: TikTok and Instagram are working on versions of their apps customized to run on TV screens following YouTube's success in the living room w/ @KalleyHuang theinformation.com/articles/tikto…

Great interviews and terrific networking :

new: When you're trying to raise $40 billion, as OpenAI is, there aren't a lot of people or places you can turn to. OpenAI projects spending $90 ~billion~ on training & inference between 2025-2027 so it's going worldwide to get the bucks it needs.

tuesday morning reading for Meta employees theinformation.com/articles/fame-…

Scoop via @coryweinberg , who has details on Meta’s stake in Scale, which looks to be another take on last year’s popular AI acquihire structure theinformation.com/articles/meta-…

We spent the weekend wrangling behind the scenes impact and investor discussions around the Elon Musk and Trump dispute. The latest w/ @nickwingfield @sightsonwheels @sylviavarnham @stevelevine: theinformation.com/articles/fract…

ICMYI: VC funds are for sale, sometimes at a discount!!💰 A Nokia pension plan, for instance, is selling its stakes in some U.S. VC funds, unloading positions worth at least $100Ms of dollars.

Worth reading: The Downsides of Vibe Coding via @jon_victor_ theinformation.com/articles/downs…

Live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital… Need I go on? Probably not. Here’s Weekend’s Big Read (by me!) on @TBPN, Silicon Valley’s new must-listen talk show from @johncoogan and @jordihays. 👇🏼

Startups are allowing employees to cash out when they're younger—and they're more frequently doing back-to-back rounds and buybacks. Three charts tell that story: theinformation.com/articles/start…

How Elon Musk's xAI plans to make money is one of the big questions in the AI field right now. @KevKubernetes & I have one possibility: the startup hopes to use data from gov't agencies to sell models / apps to gov't customers. More here: theinformation.com/articles/xai-m…