Brian Chesky: “Let’s zoom out and ask how we think the future’s going to look. There’s this AI maximalist view that there’s going to be like one or two AI models and one or two applications that rule them all and you use this one app and this one model for everything in the world. If you take that to its logical conclusion, you also start to go to this place where almost one company rules everything, and I think there’s numerous problems with the AI maximalist view that it’s one company to rule them all. One problem with it is, I don’t know if everyone wants one company to have total power and primacy, but the other is just one company is not going to build the entire future. This entire future is going to be built by millions of people in thousands or even millions of companies. There’s an alternative view, which is to say that AI can democratize the world. It’s almost like when technology stagnates the world consolidates, and when there’s this campaign explosion of technology that could actually create a lot more startups. I think that’s another alternative. I do think that every company is going to have to be an AI company or risk disintermediation. The models that are being developed we have access to as well. I think there’s a couple of things that are going to play out here. Number one, I think Airbnb will in and of itself be an AI application. We’re hiring really great people. I think we have one of the best software design teams in the world. We have great application layer design, and I think we can broaden and broaden our app. That’s partly what we’re trying to do.”
SaaStr: “The latest data from Jamin Ball’s Clouded Judgement analysis paints a sobering picture of the SaaS landscape. Aggregate quarterly net new ARR added across the cloud software universe dropped to just $1.65 billion in Q1 2025, down from $2.33 billion in Q1 2024. That’s a 29% year-over-year decline. But here’s what makes this particularly concerning: this isn’t just about one bad quarter. The trend has been building for over a year, with growth rates oscillating wildly between spikes and drops. The market experienced a brief resurgence in Q2 2024 with 50% YoY growth, only to crash back down to negative territory by Q1 2025.”
FT: “‘Vibe coding’ is the new DIY..Large language models enable us all to create our own apps, but sometimes you need a professional.”
NYTimes: “A.I. is just as much a challenge to numeracy — our knowledge and ability to use mathematics and reason quantitatively — as it is to literacy…My advice to young students today is to study language and mathematics. When you talk to a chatbot, you’re using everyday language to talk to a mathematical system that, in turn, talks back to you. Technical skills won’t be enough to deal with the unpredictable results in markets, so a broad-based knowledge of math and language will be the only way to adapt. And while jobs might disappear in one sector, we will always need humans who can make sense of A.I.”
