Airbnb’s Brian Chesky plans to launch a new AI lab
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is fed up with just being an artificial intelligence kingmaker. He now plans to support a new AI lab of his own. The news, broken by Bloomberg and confirmed to TechCrunch by a person familiar with the situation, marks Chesky as one of many Silicon Valley machers dissatisfied with the models coming out of the frontier labs.
Although Airbnb has implemented AI coding tools, Chesky said last year that it has not yet entered into an LLM partnership because existing products were not quite ready yet.
Still, Chesky has a lot of insight. He met Sam Altman in 2006 through Y Combinator, the originator of Airbnb, and stayed in touch. As OpenAI got off the ground, he met regularly with Altman to provide advice on managing a hyper-growth technology company.
Chesky, who was reportedly considered a potential OpenAI board member, helped Altman return to power after the board fired the CEO for lack of candor. Chesky advised Altman on public relations and rallied support for him among Silicon Valley bigwigs.
Now, however, he appears to be competing with his student’s company.
It’s not clear what the focus of Chesky’s new AI lab will be, although the Bloomberg article mentions user interaction and design, areas he has emphasized at Airbnb.
That’s no different than what Brett Adcock is doing at Hark, the AI lab he launched late last year to develop a new user interface for an AI assistant, although the startup also emphasizes hardware products.
Chesky won’t be going into “founder mode” with this operation either; a person familiar with the situation says he will remain CEO of Airbnb and will not run the new lab himself. Whoever gets the job will not only have to deal with the other AI labs, but also with a founder (we assume) who is known as a micromanager.
A representative for Airbnb and Chesky declined to comment.
