Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is tired of just being the king of artificial intelligence. He now plans to support his own new AI lab. The news, reported by Bloomberg and confirmed to TechCrunch by people familiar with the matter, shows that Chesky is one of many Silicon Valley matchers not satisfied with the models coming out of cutting-edge labs.
Although Airbnb has adopted AI coding tools, Chesky said last year that the LLM partnership was not possible because the existing product was not ready.
Still, Cesky has a lot of insight. He met Sam Altman through Y Combinator, which launched Airbnb in 2006, and they kept in touch. Once OpenAI took off, he began meeting regularly with Altman to advise him on running the rapidly growing technology company.
Chesky had reportedly been considered as a candidate for OpenAI’s board, and helped broker Altman’s return to power after the company’s board fired the CEO for lack of candor. Mr. Chesky advised Mr. Altman on public relations and rallied support for him among Silicon Valley bigwigs.
But now he appears to be in competition with his mentee’s company.
It’s unclear what Chesky’s new AI lab will focus on, but the Bloomberg article mentions user interaction and design, areas Chesky has emphasized at Airbnb.
This is similar to what Brett Adcock is doing at Hark, the AI lab he launched late last year to develop novel user interfaces for AI assistants, but the startup also focuses on hardware products.
Also, Mr. Chesky won’t be in “founder mode” with this operation. He will remain as Airbnb’s CEO and will not lead the new lab himself, a person familiar with the situation said. Whoever takes the job will have to contend not only with other AI institutes, but also with the (supposedly) founding chair known as the micromanager.
Representatives for Airbnb and Chesky declined to comment.
