The CEO of Allbirds’ new AI biz has a plan, but no employees
The CEO of Allbirds’ new AI biz has a plan, but no employees
Allbirds 新 AI 业务的 CEO 有了计划，但还没有员工
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. 当 Allbirds 在四月份转型 AI 时，这感觉就像是美剧《硅谷》里的笑话走进了现实：这家以轻便运动鞋定义了所谓“硅谷风格”的直面消费者（DTC）鞋履品牌，竟然也开始追逐新的潮流。
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. Well, it worked. The company sold its shoe business for $43 million, raised another $100 million from the stock market, and now it’s called Smartbird. 这一举动完全照搬了 GameStop 所书写的“迷因股”剧本：拿下一家陷入困境的上市公司，紧贴最热门的风口，随着散户投资者的涌入，坐享股价上涨带来的红利。事实证明，这招奏效了。该公司以 4300 万美元的价格出售了鞋履业务，又从股市筹集了 1 亿美元，如今更名为 Smartbird。
Now Nadia Carlsten has to make it work. A former AWS executive with an engineering PhD, Carlsten most recently led the European compute company DCAI before she began yesterday as Smartbird’s CEO. 现在，Nadia Carlsten 必须让这家公司运转起来。Carlsten 是一位拥有工程学博士学位的 AWS 前高管，在昨天出任 Smartbird CEO 之前，她最近担任的是欧洲计算公司 DCAI 的领导者。
“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.” “我们将为 AI 业务招聘一支全新的团队，并准备设立办公室，”Carlsten 在阿姆斯特丹接受 TechCrunch 采访时表示。“鞋履业务已于昨天正式关闭，所以那部分已经结束了……我现在处理的首要任务是组建领导团队，比如寻找负责基础设施运营的人选。”
Call it a startup with a sole founder and a very large seed round. What’s next is less clear. Smartbird aims to be an AI infrastructure provider, latching on to the seemingly bottomless demand for compute to train and run deep learning models. 这可以被称为一家只有一位创始人、却拥有巨额种子轮融资的初创公司。至于下一步怎么走，目前还不甚明朗。Smartbird 的目标是成为一家 AI 基础设施提供商，抓住训练和运行深度学习模型对算力看似无底洞般的需求。
But unlike neoclouds, which relentlessly arbitrage the price of chips against the cost of GPU time or inference tokens, Carlsten will be aiming at more carefully managed deployments. The ideal Smartbird customers need direct control over the servers running their models — typically for political or business-model reasons — and value data sovereignty over the scalability of the public cloud. 但与那些不断通过芯片价格与 GPU 使用时间或推理代币成本之间的差价进行套利的新型云服务商（neoclouds）不同，Carlsten 将专注于更精细化的部署。Smartbird 的理想客户需要对运行其模型的服务器拥有直接控制权（通常是出于政治或商业模式的考量），并且比起公有云的可扩展性，他们更看重数据主权。
Carlsten couldn’t yet estimate the size of that market and argued that it was fairly nascent, since many companies are still just piloting AI tools. At DCAI, she worked with Novo Nordisk and other European firms that take a special interest in data sovereignty or operate bespoke models: “We certainly have anybody that’s within the pharmaceutical industry, energy industry, financial, the public sector,” she said. Carlsten 目前还无法估算该市场的规模，并认为它还处于相当早期的阶段，因为许多公司仍处于 AI 工具的试点阶段。在 DCAI 工作时，她曾与诺和诺德（Novo Nordisk）及其他对数据主权有特殊兴趣或运营定制模型的欧洲公司合作：“我们服务的对象当然包括制药、能源、金融和公共部门的客户，”她说。
To Carlsten’s view, that means Smartbird isn’t competing with hyperscalers or neoclouds, but with internal company projects. Still, there are established companies in this space — Hewlett Packard offers a single-tenant managed AI compute service, as does Equinix, the data center giant. It’s a real business model, but it’s not clear if it has the same growth potential as the cloud services, where expansion is the be-all and end-all. 在 Carlsten 看来，这意味着 Smartbird 并非在与超大规模云厂商或新型云服务商竞争，而是在与企业内部的项目竞争。不过，该领域已有成熟的参与者——惠普（Hewlett Packard）提供单租户托管 AI 计算服务，数据中心巨头 Equinix 也是如此。这确实是一种可行的商业模式，但它是否具备云服务那种以扩张为核心目标的增长潜力，尚不明确。
Carlsten said she expects to have compute clusters deployed for several customers by the end of the year. Other startups, like the inference cloud General Compute, have bigger ambitions — the company announced a $300 billion chip order when it came out of stealth last month. Carlsten 表示，她预计到今年年底将为几家客户部署好计算集群。其他初创公司，如推理云服务商 General Compute，则有着更大的野心——该公司在上个月结束隐身状态时，宣布了一笔 3000 亿美元的芯片订单。
Carlsten says she doesn’t need big chip commitments to realize Smartbird’s vision, because her potential customers needs sit in the range of hundreds to thousands of chips — it’s “not about large scales and huge numbers of GPUs; they’re more about agility of these clusters, and more about having control of the infrastructure stack.” Carlsten 表示，她不需要巨额的芯片承诺就能实现 Smartbird 的愿景，因为她潜在客户的需求规模在数百到数千枚芯片之间——“这无关大规模和海量的 GPU；他们更看重这些集群的灵活性，以及对基础设施堆栈的掌控力。”
Smartbird is also unlikely to compete with rivals on price, since cloud services go to great lengths to optimize chip usage 24 hours a day to offer the cheapest compute, though Carlsten suspects that companies with specialized workflows will be able to work more efficiently with their own servers. Smartbird 也不太可能在价格上与竞争对手展开竞争，因为云服务商会竭尽全力优化 24 小时的芯片使用率以提供最廉价的算力。不过 Carlsten 认为，拥有专业工作流的公司使用自己的服务器反而能更高效地工作。
Demand for AI infrastructure is a powerful force in the market, driving up the stock prices for chipmakers, cloud providers, and energy companies, even convincing investors that orbital data centers are a feasible idea. But Carlsten insists that Allbird’s transition was carefully thought through. 对 AI 基础设施的需求是市场中的一股强大力量，它推高了芯片制造商、云服务商和能源公司的股价，甚至让投资者相信轨道数据中心也是一个可行的想法。但 Carlsten 坚称，Allbirds 的转型是经过深思熟虑的。
“It wasn’t, ‘Let’s just do AI, because it’s AI, and it’s hot,’” Carlsten, who will be paid a $700,000 annual salary and was awarded stock worth about $9 million to take the job, said. “It was really about, do we have a chance to build a business over time that is going to find this niche in the market and be able to grow over time?” “这并不是说‘让我们做 AI 吧，因为 AI 很火’，”Carlsten 说道。她接手这份工作将获得 70 万美元的年薪，并被授予价值约 900 万美元的股票。“这实际上是在考虑，我们是否有机会随着时间的推移建立起一项业务，找到市场中的利基点，并实现持续增长？”
When Allbirds pivoted, one thing that went by the wayside was its public benefit corporation (PBC) status, which had been intended to enshrine the sustainability commitments that were part of the shoe company’s pitch. PBC charters are often used by companies to highlight non-financial promises. OpenAI, for example, is a PBC with a focus on AI safety. This change of direction, however, suggests PBCs are hardly ironclad. 当 Allbirds 转型时，被抛弃的一项内容是其公益公司（PBC）身份，该身份原本旨在确立鞋履品牌宣传中承诺的可持续发展目标。PBC 章程常被公司用来强调非财务承诺。例如，OpenAI 就是一家专注于 AI 安全的 PBC。然而，这次方向的转变表明，PBC 身份并非坚不可摧。
Carlsten said that Smartbird’s board made a long-term commitment to execute against her AI strategy. “There are some companies out there chasing AI,” she told TechCrunch, “but at the end of the day, what matters is, is there actual weight behind the chasing?” Carlsten 表示，Smartbird 的董事会已做出长期承诺，将执行她的 AI 战略。“市面上确实有一些公司在追逐 AI，”她告诉 TechCrunch，“但归根结底，重要的是，这种追逐背后是否有真正的分量？”