In November, Airbnb acquired a stealth AI company started by Siri’s co-founder, called GamePlanner.AI. The deal valued the secretive startup at around $200 million, according to reports. While the hospitality company didn’t telegraph its plans for GamePlanner at the time, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky today shared a high-level overview of Airbnb’s bigger plans for artificial intelligence, saying it planned to accelerate in “application layer”. of AI, creating one of the “most innovative AI interfaces ever created.”
Hyperbole aside, Chesky explained that Airbnb doesn’t see itself as an AI infrastructure company — meaning it won’t be building its own big language models, but will rely on others’ AI technologies like OpenAI, Meta and Google. Instead, the company believes it can create a new interface for accessing modern AI models. This is something that getting GamePlanner could help with.
“…Although the [AI] The models are very powerful, the interface is not really an AI interface. It’s the same interface as the 2000s,” Chesky told investors on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “It’s a standard, classic web interface. So we feel that the models, in a sense, are probably underutilized,” he said. “Here’s another way of saying it. Take your phone and see all the icons on your phone. Most of these applications have not changed radically since the advent of genetic artificial intelligence. What I think AI represents is the ultimate platform change,” the CEO continued.
After the creation of the Internet, the rise of mobile technology lifted Airbnb’s business, but artificial intelligence is about to change things once again, Chesky believes. “[This] it is also a change in power. It’s a behavior change. And so I think this is a zero-zero ball game,” he said.
Airbnb plans to leverage artificial intelligence technology, and particularly the creation of artificial intelligence, to deliver a more personalized experience to its users, the executive told investors.
“Imagine an app that feels like it knows you — it’s like the ultimate concierge — an interface that’s adaptive and evolves and changes in real time, unlike any interface you’ve ever seen before. This would allow us to go from a single vertical company to a cross company,” added Chesky.
Whether Airbnb can achieve these ambitions, of course, remains to be seen. Although Chesky presents a picture of the evolution of Airbnb’s user interface, powered by AI, today’s AI systems are still often clunky and have a bad habit of returning false information through known hallucinations. That is, the AI bot will just make things up when it doesn’t know the answer. If the AI models don’t get more accurate under the hood, Airbnb’s plans for app-level improvements could also fail.
The CEO said he wouldn’t elaborate on specific AI products and services it plans to offer right now, but the company will make more announcements later this year on the AI front.
Airbnb acquired GamePlanner a few months ago, but it wasn’t clear exactly what the secretive startup did, other than being connected to artificial intelligence. Specifically, GamePlanner was founded by AI pioneer Adam Cheyer, who founded Siri (which was sold to Apple), and Siamak Hodjat. In a statement released at the time of the acquisition, Airbnb suggested that GamePlanner’s team would help accelerate the company’s AI projects by integrating its tools into the Airbnb platform.
