Airbnb Taps Ex-Meta GenAI Chief Al-Dahle as CTO
The hire signals Airbnb’s push to deepen AI-driven personalization across its platform.
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Airbnb has appointed Ahmad Al-Dahle as its new chief technology officer, effective Wednesday, January 14, a strategic hire as the company expands its use of artificial intelligence across its platform.
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said Al-Dahle will lead the company’s technology and engineering teams at a time when AI and personalization are shaping how users discover and interact with consumer platforms.
“Ahmad is one of the world’s leading experts in AI,” Chesky said in a statement, adding that he brings a combination of technical depth, design sensibility and a belief that engineering should play a strategic role across the business.
Al-Dahle joins Airbnb from Meta Platforms Inc., where he most recently led the company’s Generative AI group and oversaw development of the Llama family of open-source AI models. Those models have been downloaded more than one billion times and produced thousandsa of derivative versions used by developers globally.
On LinkedIn, Al-Dahle said his time at Meta was defined by a commitment to open source and innovation.
“We believed in a bold, unconventional idea: open-sourcing the Llama family of models,” he wrote. “Llama proved that AI won’t be built behind closed doors, and that openness can accelerate an entire industry.”
He added that his focus is now shifting from building increasingly powerful models to applying them in ways that meaningfully affect people’s lives.
“Some of the most exciting work right now won’t just be building more powerful models. It will be building products that change how people experience the real world,” he posted.
Before Meta, Al-Dahle spent more than a decade at Apple, contributing to core technologies behind the iPhone’s display and multitouch systems, the first Apple Watch and later leading efforts in the company’s autonomous technology group.
At Meta, Al-Dahle led applied AI and mapping efforts within Reality Labs before founding the company’s Generative AI organization in early 2023, following the release of ChatGPT. He played a central role in integrating AI features across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
In his post, Al-Dahle said Airbnb’s position at the intersection of technology and the physical world influenced his decision.
“Airbnb is one of the few companies that operates at the intersection of technology and the physical world, at global scale,” he wrote. “That’s where I want to be.”
The appointment comes as Meta carries out a new round of layoffs in its Reality Labs division, cutting roughly 10% of the unit’s workforce this week.
Al-Dahle succeeds Ari Balogh, who stepped down in December after seven years as Airbnb’s CTO.
