Pocket FM ropes in former Meta scientist Vasu Sharma to spearhead its AI efforts

Vasu Sharma, Head of AI, Pocket FM

• Pocket FM appoints ex-Meta scientist Vasu Sharma as Head of AI
• Sharma to lead AI research, narrative generation, and production intelligence
• Focus on developing fiction-writing models and creator-first AI tools

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Audio series platform Pocket FM has appointed former Meta AI scientist Vasu Sharma as Head of AI to accelerate its goal of becoming an artificial intelligence-led entertainment studio.

Sharma will lead the company’s AI research and applied innovation initiatives across narrative generation, production intelligence, and large-scale localisation. He will be based in the United States and report to Pocket FM co-founder Prateek Dixit.

Sharma previously worked at Meta’s Facebook AI Research (FAIR) unit for nearly three and a half years, where he contributed to several multimodal and large language model projects.

This includes the frontier open AI model Llama, as well as Chameleon, MaVIL (Masked Audio-Video Learners), and various next-generation audio-video foundation models. He was with the social networking giant. He also held positions at Citadel and Amazon Lab126.

What will Vasu Sharma's key focus areas be at Pocket FM?

Dixit told Moneycontrol that Sharma's primary focus will be building underlying foundational models and modules to bolster existing products, particularly the AI-powered writing assistant CoPilot.

Sharma will play a crucial role in developing new fiction-writing models, building creator-first AI tools, and scaling high-quality AI-assisted production workflows while maintaining a human-first ethos.

He will also look at areas such as multimodal content generation through company initiatives like Blaze, an AI-powered studio that helps creators convert text into comics.

Additionally, Sharma will be responsible for hiring and building the company's research and applied AI base to set up a full-fledged presence in the United States, Dixit said.

"Pocket FM sits at a rare intersection of AI, creativity and global storytelling. Very few companies in the world have this combination of scale, AI and a mature creator ecosystem," Sharma said.

"My focus will be to advance the Pocket LLMs and evolve the AI CoPilot into the definitive creative assistant for writers everywhere, helping them ideate richer plots, preserve voice and emotional cadence, and localise stories with cultural precision. Our ultimate objective is to unlock a new generation of IPs, powered by AI and enabled by humans," he added.

Read: Pocket FM now lets Hindi writers in India create AI audio series in a single click

Why is Pocket FM building AI models?

Sharma noted that existing foundational AI models are generally English-centric and not designed for story writing.

"This needs a fundamental research scope, where we build models from the ground up to suit our use cases. That involves significant core AI research and development: how to train these models, how to get the data, and how to evaluate them. There’s a lot of core foundational work that goes into it," he said.

Currently, CoPilot and the Pocket LLMs underpin the company's creative workflow, facilitating everything from story ideation and drafting to plot design, collaborating with other writers, editing, emotional toning, and multi-language adaptation with support for over 10 languages.

"When we talk to hobby writers, they have great ideas but developing a full-fledged long-form story is always a challenge. That will be the key focus point for us," Dixit said.

Going forward, the startup plans to develop multimodal capabilities across various formats such as voice, videos, and language.

Why are Pocket LLMs needed?

Dixit noted that while AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT are effective at writing shorter stories, complexity increases with long-form stories spanning 500-600 hours "Not just coherency or fluency, even the logical consistency becomes a challenge over time," he said.

In terms of AI video creation, Sharma said the barrier to video production has lowered significantly, hence the company aims to capture that potential, starting with anime-based videos and eventually moving to full-fledged live-action dramas.

"We just want to democratise people's creative thoughts and ideas, and how quickly they can go from a thought to something tangible that they can share with the world," he said.

What does Pocket FM do?

Pocket FM is the flagship product of Pocket Entertainment, which also operates the bite-sized online novel app Pocket Novel, the AI-first webcomics platform Pocket Toons, and the micro-drama app Pocket TV.

The service offers more than 100,000 audio series, spanning genres such as romance, drama, thriller, fantasy and science fiction, from a community of over 300,000 writers worldwide.

The platform claims to have over 250 million listeners who on average spend more than 125 minutes a day.

Started by Dixit, Rohan Nayak and Nishanth KS, Pocket Entertainment was last valued at $750 million when it raised $103 million in March 2024. It has raised $196.5 million to date.