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Tim Fernholz
Airbnb’s Brian Chesky plans to launch a new AI lab
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has had enough of merely being an artificial intelligence kingmaker. He now plans to back 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 who are unsatisfied with the models coming out of the frontier labs.
While Airbnb has adopted AI coding tools, Chesky said last year it hasn’t struck an LLM partnership because existing products weren’t quite ready.
Still, Chesky has plenty of insight. He met Sam Altman in 2006 through Y Combinator, which incubated Airbnb, and stayed in touch. When OpenAI took off, he began meeting regularly with Altman to offer advice about managing a hypergrowth tech company.
Chesky, who was reportedly considered a potential OpenAI board member, helped broker Altman’s return to power after its board of directors 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 entering competition with his mentee’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 that he has emphasized at Airbnb.
That’s not unlike what Brett Adcock is doing at Hark, the AI lab he launched late last year to develop a novel user interface for an AI assistant, although the startup is also emphasizing hardware products.
Chesky also won’t be going into “founder mode” at this operation; a person familiar with the situation says he will remain as Airbnb’s CEO and not lead the new lab himself. Whoever gets the job will have to contend not only with the other AI labs, but also with a founding chair (we presume) known as a micromanager.
A representative for Airbnb and Chesky declined to comment.
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