Pocket FM appoints former Meta AI researcher as head of AI

Pocket FM has appointed Vasu Sharma, a former scientist at Meta AI (FAIR), as its Head of Artificial Intelligence, as the audio series platform increases its focus on AI-driven content production and localization. Sharma will report to co-founder Prateek Dixit and lead AI research and applied systems across storytelling, production workflows, and language adaptation.

In his new role, Sharma will oversee the development of the company’s internal language models and its AI CoPilot system, which supports story ideation, drafting, editing, emotional tuning, and translation for creators on the platform. His role includes building fiction-focused AI systems and scaling AI-assisted production while keeping creators central to the process.

Sharma joins Pocket FM from Meta, where he was an Applied Research Scientist Lead at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). At Meta, he worked on large-scale multimodal and language models, including projects such as Llama, Chameleon, CM3Leon, MaVIL, and other audio-video foundation models. His work focused on generative AI, self-supervised learning, and deploying research systems at production scale.

Before Meta, Sharma worked as a quantitative researcher at Citadel and as an applied scientist at Amazon Lab126, where he contributed to Alexa AI. At Amazon, his work covered multimodal transformers, video-language systems, embodied AI, and benchmarking for navigation and reinforcement learning tasks. Alongside industry roles, he has advised startups and venture funds on AI strategy and product development and has led AI education initiatives as a research director at Algoverse.

Sharma has published more than 90 research papers across conferences such as NeurIPS, CVPR, ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, and ICML, with work spanning vision-language models, long-context reasoning, audio-video learning, and evaluation of large language models. His research output has received over 10,000 citations.

“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. 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,” Vasu Sharma said on joining Pocket FM.  

Commenting on the appointment, Prateek Dixit, co-founder, Pocket FM said, “Vasu brings world-class AI research experience, and his expertise in multimodal and long-form language models will significantly accelerate our creator-first AI vision.”

Sharma holds a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from IIT Kanpur.