When Allbirds pivoted to AI in April, it felt like a joke from 'Silicon Valley' breaking free of the TV: The direct-to-consumer shoe purveyor whose flimsy kicks helped define what we'll loosely call 'Silicon Valley style' had discovered a new trend to chase. The move was right out of the meme stock playbook written by GameStop: Take a troubled public company, latch on to the hottest fad, and reap the rewards of a rising stock price as retail investors pile in. 'We're going to be recruiting a brand-new team for the AI business, and we're going to be getting an office,' Carlsten told TechCrunch from Amsterdam. 'The shoe business has officially closed as of yesterday, so that's all done ' The first task that I'm tackling right now is rounding up the leadership team, looking for somebody to lead infrastructure operations, for example.' Smartbird aims to be an AI infrastructure provider, latching on to the seemingly bottomless demand for compute to train and run deep learning models. But...
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