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Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has had enough of merely being an artificial intelligence kingmaker. He now plans to back a new AI lab of his own. The news, broken by Bloomberg<\/a> and confirmed to TechCrunch by a person familiar with the situation, marks Chesky as one of many Silicon Valley machers who are unsatisfied with the models coming out of the frontier labs.<\/p>\n While Airbnb has adopted AI coding tools, Chesky said last year it hasn\u2019t struck an LLM partnership because existing products weren\u2019t quite ready.<\/p>\n Still, Chesky has plenty of insight. He met Sam Altman in 2006 through Y Combinator, which incubated Airbnb, and stayed in touch. When OpenAI took off, he began meeting regularly with Altman to offer advice about managing a hypergrowth tech company.<\/p>\n Chesky, who was reportedly considered a potential OpenAI board member, helped broker Altman\u2019s return to power after its board of directors fired the CEO for lack of candor. Chesky advised Altman on public relations and rallied support for him among Silicon Valley bigwigs.<\/p>\n Now, however, he appears to be entering competition with his mentee\u2019s company.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear what the focus of Chesky\u2019s new AI lab will be, although the Bloomberg article mentions user interaction and design, areas that he has emphasized at Airbnb.<\/p>\n