Inside-Out AI: Rebuilding Airbnb Behind the Scenes and Across the Guest Experience

Prior to joining Airbnb as CTO in January, Ahmad Al-Dahle was head of generative AI at Meta and led the launch of its open source Llama models over 2023-2025. Now Al-Dahle is in charge of turning Airbnb into an “AI-native company”. What that means in practice is using AI internally to speed up product development, then using those same capabilities to transform the customer experience. We’re calling this an “inside-out AI” approach and in this article we’ll dig into the details. An example of inside-out AI: Airbnb used a custom internal tool called Everest to help accelerate the launch of a new external service. (Diagram by Latent Space) Al-Dahle spoke with Latent Space about Airbnb’s AI transformation. We began by asking him why he made the shift from building frontier models at Meta to deploying them at Airbnb. “Fundamentally, I like to chase where I believe the hard frontiers live,” he replied, pun perhaps…