Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky to Launch a New Artificial Intelligence Lab Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is moving from AI “kingmaker” to direct backer, planning a new artificial intelligence lab that could put him in competition with the very frontier labs he once advised, including OpenAI. The project signals a broader challenge to today’s text-first chatbots in areas like travel and commerce.

Early signals and growing frustration

Chesky’s dissatisfaction with existing large language models surfaced publicly last year, when he said Airbnb had not struck an LLM partnership because “existing products weren’t quite ready” for what he wanted to build. His core argument: travel and commerce demand “a rich visual interface, not the text-based chatbots that OpenAI and Anthropic have popularised.”

Meanwhile, Airbnb steadily deepened its own AI usage. The company rebuilt its app around a large language model for conversational search, automated 40% of customer support queries via an AI bot, and introduced AI-generated listing details and review summaries, with a voice assistant planned for later this year.

From adviser to rival

Chesky’s move comes after two decades in which he played a behind-the-scenes role in AI. He met Sam Altman through Y Combinator in 2006 and later advised him on managing OpenAI’s “hypergrowth.” During the 2023 governance crisis, Chesky helped broker Altman’s return to power after the board fired him, advising on public relations and rallying Silicon Valley support.

Now, Chesky is backing an AI lab of his own, with reporting describing the effort as putting him “in competition with Sam Altman’s OpenAI.” He will remain Airbnb’s CEO and “will not lead the lab himself,” with details still “early-stage and could change.”

Competing visions for AI’s next layer

Chesky wants Airbnb to build “at the model layer, not just the application layer,” reflecting a belief that frontier labs have “focused on intelligence at the expense of interface.” His emerging stance aligns with others in Silicon Valley, such as Brett Adcock’s Hark, which is building a “universal AI interface” and emphasising hardware and design, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, which pursues real-time “interaction models.”

Supporters see Chesky’s lab as a natural extension of Airbnb’s design-first ethos into AI. Skeptics note that whoever leads the lab must compete with established AI giants and work under a founding chair “known as a micromanager.”

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