Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is planning to back a new AI lab focused on user interaction and design, while remaining at Airbnb. The move puts him in indirect competition with OpenAI's Sam Altman, whom Chesky helped reinstate after the 2023 board crisis. Chesky's frustration stems from existing frontier models being too text-centric for the rich visual interfaces travel and commerce require. Airbnb has already made significant AI investments, including hiring Meta's generative AI lead as CTO and rebuilding its app around LLMs. The lab's details remain vague — no name, team, funding, or timeline — but the thesis is clear: Chesky believes the interface layer between AI models and consumers is underserved and worth dedicated research. This fits a broader pattern of prominent founders like Brett Adcock (Hark) and Mira Murati (Thinking Machines Lab) building their own AI research capacity rather than relying on commodity models from frontier labs.
