Airbnb has appointed Ahmad Al-Dahle as its new chief technology officer, effective January 14, 2026, the company announced on Wednesday.
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said Al-Dahle would lead the company’s technology and engineering efforts at a time when AI is reshaping consumer platforms.
“Ahmad is one of the world’s leading experts in AI,” Chesky said in a statement. “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 led the Generative AI group and oversaw development of the Llama family of open-source AI models. Chesky said the models have been downloaded more than one billion times, with over 60,000 derivative versions created by developers globally.
On his appointment as CTO, Al-Dahle said model capabilities were advancing quickly, and the focus now was on using them to build products people love that help them connect with real people and places.
Before Meta, Al-Dahle spent more than a decade at Apple. He joined the company in 2005 while studying engineering at the University of Waterloo and later worked full-time on core technologies behind the iPhone’s display and multitouch systems.
He also contributed to multiple Apple devices, including the first Apple Watch, and in 2014 led Apple’s autonomous technology group focused on AI systems for its self-driving car project.
In 2020, Al-Dahle moved to Meta to lead mapping and applied AI within Reality Labs. Following the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, he founded Meta’s Generative AI group in early 2023 and led efforts to integrate AI features across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
In other news, Meta has begun a fresh round of layoffs in its Reality Labs division this week, cutting roughly 10% of the unit’s workforce, or more than 1,000 roles.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist, credited Al-Dahle with shaping the company’s generative AI push and accelerating open-source AI adoption. “Running the GenAI organisation at Meta was no small feat,” LeCun said.
He added that open-sourcing Llama-2 and subsequent 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.”
Notably, LeCun also left Meta recently to found his own AI startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs, where he serves as executive chair.
The post Airbnb Names Meta Generative AI Head Ahmad Al-Dahle as CTO appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
