The mythos of Mythos and Allbirds takes flight to the neocloud

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place.
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**Daniel Whitenack** (0:41)
Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI podcast. This is Daniel Whitenack. I am CEO at Prediction Guard. I'm joined as always by my co-host Chris Benson, who is a principal AI and autonomy research engineer. How are you doing, Chris?

**Chris Benson** (0:57)
Hey, I'm doing great today, Daniel. Looking forward to catching up on one of these fully connected episodes where we get to talk about kind of whatever we want to talk about.

**Daniel Whitenack** (1:05)
Whatever we want to talk about. No one, I mean, I guess normally we just talk about what we want to talk about, but at least when we have a guest, we try to center the conversation on maybe a few things they want to talk about. I'm pretty excited, Chris, because I just got a brand new pair of shoes.
I've been wearing my new shoes all week, and I didn't think that that would be a relevant topic to bring up with you on the Practical AI podcast, because I thought shoes really didn't have any overlap with the AI world. Although I guess this is not the topic we're going to talk about, but I did see a company that had like you take a picture of your foot and like the AI figures out the shape of your foot or whatever, and then like could, I guess, advise on shoes or something. Anyway, but speaking of shoes, today, I didn't even see this, but folks in the office here at Prediction Guard were like, hey, did you hear about Allbirds? And I had not heard about Allbirds, but apparently, Allbirds is now an AI company, which is quite interesting. So Chris, do you have a pair of Allbirds? I guess they're AI Allbirds now.

**Chris Benson** (2:29)
I actually don't, but I gotta say, that's a terribly interesting way of retreading your business model.

**Daniel Whitenack** (2:39)
Yes, yeah, they really kicked it to the curb, I guess.

**Chris Benson** (2:46)
So from shoes to AI data centers?

**Daniel Whitenack** (2:50)
Yeah, well, I guess kind of background information for people here. I sort of only know this because my wife was really into Allbirds. She had a few pairs. But it seems like kind of 2016 to around just after COVID 2021, there was this huge rise of the Allbirds brand, which was a favorite in terms of shoes that you would order online. I think eventually they did have retail locations, that sort of thing. But from 2022 to 2025, so through this kind of last year, they kind of consistently had a decline, called growth, margins kind of compressed, and their stock price declined, making the business distressed. And so I guess March of this year, so as we're recording this, we're in April of 2026
In March of 2026 of this year, Allbirds exited the actual footwear shoe part of their business. So selling off all of those assets to American Exchange Group. Don't know a whole lot about them, but basically that sort of ends the shoe operation portion of Allbirds. They still of course had the shell of a company, which had a name and an entity and a stock ticker, et cetera. And they had a bunch of cash, right? So what do you do with a bunch of cash? I guess they did also raise additional cash.
What do you do with a bunch of cash but buy GPUs? Of course.

**Chris Benson** (4:41)
What else is there?

**Daniel Whitenack** (4:43)
Apparently, what happened?

**Chris Benson** (4:45)
Isn't that what you do with all your cash?

**Daniel Whitenack** (4:47)
Yes. Rebranding as AI compute infrastructure, which I'm wondering if they'll give me AI compute infrastructure for cheaper.
That would be nice.

**Chris Benson** (5:01)
It's amazing, we're joking about this being kind of the pivot you didn't see coming, and quite a pivot too, but their shares jumped at least 700 percent based on what I'm looking at here, which is quite a jump in terms of the market not only accepting, but endorsing that kind of a decision.
You got to be wondering if there aren't many, many boards out there and CEOs that are going, we're in a tough spot in our business. Things have been struggling recently. Maybe we go buy GPUs and go into the AI business. I mean, it apparently is a perfectly legit business plan now.