As Anthropic attempts to take on the artificial intelligence giants, it has a new big-name executive: The company announced this morning Mike Krieger as its new chief product officer. Krieger, of course, is one of the co-founders of Instagram and has spent the past few years developing Artifact, an artificial intelligence news reading app that was recently acquired by Yahoo.
Krieger will oversee all future product efforts for Anthropic. It’s also a big product push moment for the company: It recently launched its Claude app for iOS, long after many of its competitors launched mobile apps, and it just announced support for Spanish, French, Italian and Use of other languages. Founded by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic seems to have been primarily focused on building out its core technology over the past few years, but seems to understand that it needs to turn all of that technology into a product, and there’s no time to waste.
Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others seem to be in a race to apply artificial intelligence models to everything. The underlying technologies are changing rapidly, and the products people use these technologies are also evolving rapidly.
“Mike’s background in developing intuitive products and user experiences will be invaluable as we create new ways for people to interact with Cloud, particularly in the workplace,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement announcing the hire. “We are fortunate to add Mike’s vision and expertise to our leadership team. ” This point about the workplace is interesting: it sounds like Krieger’s job might be to find a business-focused use for Cloud, at least at first.
The field of artificial intelligence is super hot right now, with more new stuff and louder hype almost every day. Krieger once built a highly successful company in a fiercely competitive environment; the stakes may be higher this time.
