Airbnb's fall product update pushes the company in two directions at once. In the physical world, it is adding more services to compete with hotels. In the app, it is using AI and its own user network to help travelers decide where to go and what to do.
The headline feature is AI-powered search for properties. Alongside it come expanded in-stay services and a new set of social tools built around friends' travel history.
AI search, but not a chatbot
Airbnb has been careful with AI. CEO Brian Chesky has deliberately avoided a chatbot-style interface, and he hinted at the new search feature earlier this year. The result is a toggle in the app rather than a conversation window.
OpenAI says it has shut down a coordinated attempt to extract the hidden reasoning of its models. Independent researchers, however, found that the same technique kept working on Microsoft Azure for weeks afterwards. The case shows how a security fix at the source can miss the cloud platforms that resell the same models.
What OpenAI says happened
In a blog post, OpenAI describes what it calls an "adversarial distillation" campaign. Distillation means training one model on another model's output. The most valuable target is the full chain of thought: the intermediate steps a reasoning model works through before it answers. Users normally see only the final answer.
General Intuition Inc. has closed a $220 million funding round that values the company at $6.2 billion. The startup builds world models, AI systems that generate synthetic video which can be used to train other AI models, including those that control robots.
The round brings in a long list of investors: Valor Equity Partners, Atreides, Seven Seven Six, Point72, Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. It lands roughly a year after General Intuition was spun out of Medal B.V., a video sharing startup.
A gaming clip library as training data
The company's origin explains its data advantage. Medal offers a free tool that lets players capture and record footage from video games. General Intuition uses that footage to train its own AI models.
DoorDash wants customers to skip its app entirely. On Wednesday, the delivery company announced a new AI agent that takes food orders by text message. It runs inside Apple Messages instead of DoorDash's own interface. For now, people in the U.S. can sign up for a waitlist to try it.
How the agent works
You write what you want in plain language, and the agent turns it into an order. DoorDash's own example is a message like "order my usual." The company says the agent can work out that this means the order a customer normally places on a Friday night, and then act on it.
EliseAI, which builds AI software for two very different customer groups, property managers and healthcare providers, has closed a $350 million funding round. The deal values the company at $4 billion.
Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer co-led the investment. Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Sapphire Ventures and Navitas Capital also took part, according to the company's announcement on September 29.
The money will go toward broadening EliseAI's automation features. The company also plans to hire more engineers, software deployment specialists and salespeople.
From rental leads to repair tickets
EliseAI, formally Elise A.I. Technologies Corp., was founded in 2017. It started out in rental housing, and that market is still the core of its business. The company says its platform now supports the management of more than one in six apartments in the United States.
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