‘AI is going to change the world much more than anybody realises,’ says Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, at Skift Forum in New York. Jenny Southan reports
Globetrender attended the recent Skift Forum in New York where Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky took part in a live video-call conversation with Skift co-founder Rafat Ali. Here is what was said…
Ali: You mentioned AI when I talked to you last year, and you said next year, Airbnb’s experience will be totally different because of AI. We’re sitting here now in 2025 but it hasn’t happened. Why? And what’s your sense of what’s to come?
Chesky: “I don’t like to make promises and not deliver on those promises, but I’m not going to deliver on the promise of AI, and no one will.
“I think AI is going to change the world much more than anybody realises. I also think it’s going to take way longer than anyone realises. This decade, things aren’t going to change as much as people think. And next decade, things are going to change a lot more.
“When ChatGPT launched, I think we imagined all the ways the world was going to change. And if you think about AI as three layers, you have the chips, the models and the applications. The chips are Nvidia, model would be OpenAI, and apps are everyone building on top.
“We’ve made a lot of development on chips – Nvidia is kind of the only company making a profit on AI. Then you have the models. The models are, are growing very, very quickly. You have OpenAI, Google’s got a model, and Nano’s got a model, and Mistral, and Entropiq, there’s a lot of models.
“But then the most important layer is the application layer. And there really hasn’t been a lot of development or breakthroughs at the application layer on AI. For example, ChatGPT is not an AI interface. It’s an AI model, but it’s a kind of Web 2.0 interface. It’s not that different than an interface from 2005, right? And same with our interface. Our interface is a pre-AI interface.
“So the holy grail is going to be when we all figure out the interface at the application layer that connects to the model. The other thing is AI has to work 100% of the time, not 90 percent of the time. So with ChatGPT, if it works 90% of the time, that’s great. But with other businesses like Airbnb, it’s got to work a lot more than 90% of the time. So [an AI-powered Airbnb app] is going to take longer.
“I do believe that 99% of the money – in what we call the economy of the future – will be in apps. The applications on top of the model. So first you can see the apps change. And then you’re going to see the service layer on top of the apps change. And then you have a societal adoption. And each of those is going to take years. Kind of like self driving cars.
“It’s not enough for the technology to work. We’ve got to actually get them all on the road, and then the fleet’s got to turn over. And that might take another ten years after the technology’s available. There’s going to be a very long societal adoption of AI that’s going to take ten to 20 years, probably.”
Ali: “You’ve become a sort of ‘Silicon Valley savant’, the ‘CEO whisperer’. You’re very good friends with Sam Altman [CEO of OpenAI], and you’ve helped him through many crises. To what end?”
Chesky: “When I came to Silicon Valley in 2007, the word technology might as well have been the dictionary definition for the word ‘good’. The internet seemed pretty innocent. But I think as tech became very powerful, people started seeing that when you build a platform that impacts hundreds of millions of people, it is impossible for there not to be unintended consequences. And that’s true of Airbnb.
“We’re just trying to help people make extra money by renting out their extra space. We did not consider impacts on affordable housing, or overtourism. But you cannot invent something, put it in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, and not have unintended consequences.
“So, I think there’s been a cultural shift in Silicon Valley. And I want people to know that I do think that the vast majority of people that I met in Silicon Valley, are earnest people that want to do the right thing. I can’t say that about everyone, but I think the portrayal of Silicon Valley as a rapacious place, by some, is not true at all. Because most of us, I like to joke, most of us didn’t get in it for the money.
“If I tried to get an Airbnb for the money, I wouldn’t have started by renting three air mattresses. So a lot of us got in it because we make things, we’re designers and engineers, we like building things and we hit a jackpot. Obviously money does change things, but our intentions and where we start really make a difference.
“I’ve been pretty involved in OpenAI unofficially I’m probably one of [Sam Altman’s] closest confidants. And the reason I do that is for two reasons. Number one – I have had a good relationship with Sam, and I want to help people that I believe in. But more importantly, I believe in the importance of AI.
“I think that we have to get AI right. But the question isn’t ‘will we get the technology right?’ It’s ‘how will the technology intersect with society?’ In other words, all the lessons I learned from Airbnb, and all the lessons we learned in the last generation, AI is going to happen a lot faster. If we were going 30 miles an hour [in the past], now we’re going 300 miles an hour.
“I want to be helpful in making sure that we’re really thoughtful about how we bring this technology to society. This is probably going to change the world more than the Industrial Revolution. Most people, smart people I know, say this is more profound than the Industrial Revolution – the moment computers can think, which is probably the simplest way to describe super intelligence and AGI [artificial general intelligence].”