Airbnb CEO Throws Subtle Shade at OpenAI; Khosla’s Enterprise AI Fix

Welcome back! 

At its developer conference earlier this month, OpenAI showed a forthcoming feature that lets ChatGPT users access services from Expedia, Uber and Spotify directly in the chatbot. Some consumer apps might view such a feature as a threat because it bypasses their sites, preventing them from showcasing other products.

For his part, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told Bloomberg Wednesday he won’t let people use his company’s travel booking service in ChatGPT because he “didn’t think [the OpenAI product] was quite ready.” Chesky said the decision was based on technical considerations—Airbnb’s requirement that people take several steps to verify their identities—as opposed to competitive concerns. 

As for whether Airbnb will eventually integrate its app with ChatGPT, he said, “I think so” and that he has advised OpenAI about the feature and that his app would need to operate in an “almost self-contained” manner within the chat app.

Fair enough. But while Chesky said ChatGPT could become an alternative to Google for people who are planning trips, he said he also envisions Airbnb becoming a “one-stop shop for travel.” 

Chesky also said Airbnb is “relying a lot” on Alibaba’s Qwen open-weight model to power an AI customer service agent, launched in May. While Airbnb also uses OpenAI’s newest models for the same agent, Chesky said “there are faster and cheaper models” that are a better fit for handling many queries. Airbnb also uses models from several other providers, he said. 

The Qwen name-check shouldn’t be a huge surprise. My colleagues have covered the rise of the Alibaba-made model alongside another Chinese entrant, DeepSeek. Qwen has exceeded Meta Platforms’ open-weight Llama models on several technical benchmarks and is a top challenger to DeepSeek’s R1.