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Contact usAI NewsAfter Mahabharat, JioStar Plans More AI-Led Productions, To Hire Around 80 AI Specialists
3:17 PM IST · June 3, 2026
Among the projects currently in development are Makaraj, a new television series, Hanuman, a feature film based on the Ramayana and several short-form micro-dramas.
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Reliance held the 49th edition of its annual general meeting (AGM) with shareholders on Friday. The Indian conglomerate unveiled various new artificial intelligence (AI) innovations that its telecom service provider (TSP) arm, Reliance Jio, plans to join in the coming months in the country. Among the many announcements, the company revealed its plan to integrate AI directly into its network. The company claims that this will allow the TSP to introduce a voice-based AI call agent for its subscribers. During the presentation, the company demonstrated the AI agent's capabilities, showing that it will be able to transcribe calls and generate call summaries without asking users to download a standalone app.
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When Allbirds pivoted to AI in April, it felt like a joke fromSilicon Valleybreaking free of the TV: The direct-to-consumer shoe purveyor whose flimsy kicks helped define what weâll 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 onto the hottest fad, and reap the rewards of a rising stock price as retail investors piled in. Well, it worked. The company sold its shoe business for $43 million, raised another $100 million from the stock market, and now itâs called 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 Smartbirdâs CEO. âWeâre going to be recruiting a brand new team for the AI business, and weâre going to be getting an office,â Carlsten told TechCrunch from Amsterdam. âThe shoe business has officially closed as of yesterday, so thatâs all doneâŠThe first task that Iâm tackling right now is rounding up the leadership team, looking for somebody to lead infrastructure operations, for example.â Call it a startup with a sole founder and a very large seed round. Whatâs 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. 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 â typically for political or business-model reasons â and value data sovereignty over the scalability of the public cloud. Carlsten couldnât 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 who take a special interest in data sovereignty or operate bespoke modelsââwe certainly have anybody thatâs within the pharmaceutical industry, energy industry, financial, the public sector,â she said. To Carlstenâs view, that means Smartbird isnât competing with hyperscalers or neoclouds, but with internal company projects. Still, there are established companies in this spaceâHewlett Packard offers a single-tenant managed AI compute service, as does Equinix, the data center giant. Itâs real business model, but itâs not clear if it has the same growth potential as the cloud services, where expansion is the be-all, end-all. 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 ambitionsâthe companyannounceda $300 billion chip order when it came out of stealth last month. Carlsten says she doesnât need big chip commitments to realize Smartbirdâs vision, because her potential customers needs sit in the range of hundreds to thousands of chipsâitâs ânot about large scales and huge numbers of GPUs, theyâre more about agility of these clusters, and more about having control of the infrastructure stack.â 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. 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 Allbirdâs transition was carefully thought through. âIt wasnât, âLetâs just do AI, because itâs AI, and itâs hot,ââ Carlsten, who will be paid a $700,000 annual salary and was awarded stock worth about $9 million to take the job, said. âIt 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?â When Allbirds pivoted, one thing that went by the wayside was its public benefit corporation status, which had been intended to enshrine the sustainability commitments that were part of the shoe companyâs 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. Carlsten said that Smartbirdâs board made a long-term commitment to execute against her AI strategy. âThere are some companies out there chasing AI,â she told TechCrunch,â but at the end of the day, what matters is, is there actual weight behind the chasing?â
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The planned IPO comes as Reliance accelerates investments in artificial intelligence, data centres and AI-generated media content through its various businesses.
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Automotive firms are rethinking their GCC locations as software and industrial engineering are beginning to merge.
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