Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is funding a new AI lab focused on user interaction and design, putting him in quiet competition with the OpenAI he has spent the last several years advising. Chesky will remain CEO of Airbnb and will not run the new lab himself, according to people familiar with the plans. The venture is in the early stages of fundraising, and details could still shift.
The move turns Chesky from AI patron into AI principal. He met Sam Altman in 2006 through Y Combinator, the accelerator that incubated Airbnb nearly 20 years ago, and the two have stayed close. When OpenAI took off, Chesky began meeting regularly with Altman to coach him through the operational demands of running a hypergrowth company.
Chesky was reportedly considered for an OpenAI board seat and helped engineer Altman's return after the board fired him for what it called a lack of candor. He advised on public relations and rallied Silicon Valley support behind the ousted CEO. Now he is launching a lab that, by definition, will build models that compete with OpenAI's.
Key facts
- 01Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is funding a new AI lab focused on user interaction and design, while remaining CEO of Airbnb.
- 02Chesky met Sam Altman in 2006 through Y Combinator and advised him through OpenAI's 2023 board crisis.
- 03Airbnb has declined to strike an LLM partnership, with Chesky saying existing tools aren't robust enough.
- 04Chesky is targeting $1 billion or more in annual revenue from new Airbnb add-on services.
- 05The lab joins a growing field including Brett Adcock's Hark, launched late last year.
The focus appears to be user interaction and design — areas Chesky has pushed hard at Airbnb and has publicly said the frontier labs have neglected. He has argued repeatedly that AI applications for travel and e-commerce need a richer interface than the text-based chatbots popularized by OpenAI and Anthropic. Unlike rivals Expedia Group and Booking Holdings, Airbnb has not built a ChatGPT plug-in, with Chesky saying the underlying tools aren't ready.
Airbnb has, however, leaned heavily on AI internally. The company is mid-transformation into a do-it-all travel app, with new add-on services that Chesky hopes will eventually generate $1 billion or more in annual revenue. Airbnb engineers are using AI coding tools to compress timelines for new business pilots from years to weeks.
“Airbnb employees have embraced AI coding tools to help accelerate the expansion, with new business pilots spun up in weeks rather than years”— Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO
The new lab is not a solo project from the CEO chair. One person familiar with the plans said Chesky will not be the chief executive — somebody else will run day-to-day operations while Chesky serves as what is presumed to be founding chair. Whoever takes the job inherits a backer that entrepreneur Paul Graham described in 2024, in the essay where he coined the term founder mode, as one of tech's most hands-on operators.
The competitive landscape is crowded. Brett Adcock launched Hark late last year to build a novel AI assistant interface, though Hark is also pushing hardware. A wave of veteran operators have similarly concluded that the model layer is too important — and the existing labs too narrow in their UX instincts — to leave to the incumbents. Chesky's design-school background and direct product instincts give him a recognizable angle in that crowd.
There is no public funding figure, no named co-founders, no disclosed compute partner, and no timeline. Representatives for Chesky and Airbnb declined to comment on the plans. The lab could shift focus before it ships anything, and running a model lab as part-time chair while remaining a Fortune 500 CEO is a structural bet that has rarely worked for anyone.
Chesky's entry is a tell on where the frontier-model market is heading. The most plugged-in operators in tech — the ones who have spent years inside the OpenAI flywheel — are concluding that the current crop of labs has left the interface and product layer thinly contested, and that there is room to build a model company whose first principle is what the user actually touches. Whether that thesis produces a viable rival to ChatGPT or just an expensive design exercise will determine whether Airbnb's CEO has discovered the next category or merely funded the most expensive consulting engagement of his career.
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