Airbnb has taken its time to launch AI features within the app, but CEO Brian Chesky on Friday said the company is now planning to bake in features powered by large language models that would help users search for listings, plan their trips, and aid hosts in managing their properties.
Speaking at the company’s fourth-quarter conference call, Chesky said the company wants to increase its use…
Airbnb says a third of its customer support is now handled by AI in the US and Canada
February 16, 2026
Airbnb says its custom-built AI agent is now handling roughly a third of its customer support issues in North America, and it’s preparing to roll out the feature globally. If successful, the company believes that in a year’s time, more than 30% of its total…
Elon Musk suggests spate of xAI exits have been push, not pull
February 16, 2026
Elon Musk is addressing a wave of departures from xAI, including two more co-founders who left this week, bringing the total to six out of the original 12.
At an all-hands meeting Tuesday night, Musk suggested the exits were about fit, not performance. “Because…
“Join xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to you,” CEO Elon Musk proclaimed yesterday following a restructuring that saw a stream of former executives exit the AI lab.
This is an interesting recruitment strategy after the company’s merger with Musk’s rocket maker, SpaceX, and the combined company’s anticipated IPO. You might think that xAI employees…
Spotify says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December, thanks to AI
February 13, 2026
Has AI coding reached a tipping point? That seems to be the case for Spotify at least, which shared this week during its fourth-quarter earnings call that the best developers at the company “have not written a single line of code since December.” That statement…
A new version of OpenAI’s Codex is powered by a new dedicated chip
February 13, 2026
On Thursday, OpenAI announced the release of a light-weight version of its agentic coding tool Codex, the latest model of which OpenAI launched earlier this month. GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is described by the company as a “smaller version” of that model, one that is…
Meridian raises $17 million to remake the agentic spreadsheet
February 12, 2026
The fight to tame spreadsheets with AI isn’t over yet. A new company called Meridian has emerged from stealth with a more comprehensive IDE-based approach to agentic financial modeling – and plenty of funding to build it. On Wednesday, the company announced $17 million in seed funding at a $100 million post-money valuation.
“Our goal is to make financial modeling and spreadsheets…
On Tuesday night, Elon Musk gathered the employees of xAI for an all-hands meeting. Evidently, he wanted to talk about the future of his AI company and, specifically, how it relates to the moon.
According to The New York Times, which reports that it heard the meeting, Musk…
Okay, now exactly half of xAI’s founding team has left the company
February 12, 2026
Monday night, xAI co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced he was leaving the company. “It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu wrote in a late-night post on X. “It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine…
Modern enterprises generate enormous amounts of security data, but legacy tools like Splunk still require companies to store all of it in one place before they can detect threats – a slow and costly process that’s increasingly breaking down in cloud environments where volumes are exploding and data lives everywhere.
AI cybersecurity startup Vega Security wants to flip that approach by…
