Ahmad Al-Dahle will take on the role of Chief Technology Officer from January 14, 2026, amid the rising impact of artificial intelligence on global consumer platforms.
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said Al-Dahle will lead the company’s technology and engineering teams during a critical phase of growth. “Ahmad is one of the world’s leading experts in AI,” Chesky said. “He connects big ideas with technical depth, highly values design, and believes engineering should be a true strategic partner in everything we do.”
Al-Dahle joins Airbnb from Meta, where he most recently headed the Generative AI group. In this role, he led the development of the Llama family of open-source AI models. Chesky noted that these models have been downloaded more than 1 billion times, with over 60,000 derivative versions created by developers worldwide.
Commenting on his new role, Al-Dahle said that while AI model capabilities are advancing quickly, the priority must now shift to real-world impact. He said the focus should be on using these technologies to build products people love that help them connect with real people and places.
Before his tenure at Meta, Al-Dahle spent more than a decade at Apple. During this period, he contributed to key technologies behind the iPhone’s display and multitouch systems, worked on the first Apple Watch, and later led Apple’s autonomous technology group. He then moved to Meta, where he played a central role in shaping the company’s generative AI strategy.
AI researcher Yann LeCun credited Al-Dahle with accelerating open-source AI adoption. “Running the GenAI organisation at Meta was no small feat,” he said, adding that open-sourcing Llama models under Al-Dahle’s leadership “jump-started an entire industry” and helped “unlock the idea of open-source foundation models for the broader AI community.”
With this appointment, Airbnb is strengthening its technology leadership as it looks to integrate AI more deeply into its platform and user experience.
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