In November, Airbnb acquired a stealth AI firm launched by Siri’s co-founder, called GamePlanner.AI. The deal valued the secretive startup at around $200 million, in response to reports. Though the hosting company didn’t telegraph its plans for GamePlanner on the time, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky today shared a high-level overview of Airbnb’s larger plans for AI, saying that it planned to accel on the “application layer” of AI, constructing one among the “most progressive AI interfaces ever created.”
Hyperbole aside, Chesky explained that Airbnb doesn’t see itself as an AI infrastructure company — meaning it’s not going to construct its own large language models, but will depend on AI technologies from others, like OpenAI, Meta and Google. As a substitute, the corporate believes it may well create a latest interface for accessing modern AI models. That’s something the GamePlanner acquisition could help with.
“…Though the [AI] models are very powerful, the interface is actually not an AI interface. It’s the identical interface because the 2000s,” Chesky told investors on the corporate’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “It’s a typical, classical web interface. So we feel just like the models, in a way, are probably underutilized,” he said. “Here’s one other way of claiming it. Take your phone and take a look at all of the icons in your phone. Most of those apps haven’t fundamentally modified for the reason that advent of generative AI. So what I believe AI represents is the last word platform shift,” the CEO continued.
After the web’s creation, the rise of mobile technology lifted Airbnb’s business, but AI goes to alter things once more, Chesky believes. “[This] can also be a shift in power. It’s a shift in behavior. And so I believe this can be a zero-zero ballgame,” he said.
Airbnb plans to leverage AI technology and particularly generative AI to supply a more personalized experience for its users, the exec told investors.
“Imagine an app that you are feeling like knows you — it’s like the last word concierge — an interface that’s adaptive and evolving and changing in real-time, unlike no interface you’ve ever seen before. That might allow us to go from a single vertical company to a cross-vertical company,” Chesky added.
Whether or not Airbnb can deliver on these ambitions, in fact, stays to be seen. Though Chesky paints an image of an evolution of the Airbnb user interface, powered by AI, today’s AI systems are sometimes still difficult to make use of and have a nasty habit of returning false information through what are referred to as hallucinations. That’s, the AI bot will simply make things up when it doesn’t know the reply. If the AI models don’t develop into more accurate under the hood, Airbnb’s plans for application layer improvements could also fall short.
The CEO said he wouldn’t detail specific AI services it plans to supply right now, but the corporate will make more announcements later this 12 months on the AI front.
Airbnb acquired GamePlanner just a few months ago, but it surely wasn’t clear exactly what the secretive startup did, beyond being tied to AI. Notably, GamePlanner was co-founded by AI pioneer Adam Cheyer, who co-founded Siri (which was sold to Apple), and Siamak Hodjat. In an announcement released on the time of the acquisition, Airbnb suggested that the GamePlanner team would help to speed up the corporate’s AI projects by integrating its tooling into the Airbnb platform.