Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger Joins Amazon-Backed Anthropic

Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger will join Anthropic as chief product officer, the company announced Wednesday.

Krieger, the former chief technology officer of MetaInstagram-owned Instagram grew the platform to 1 billion users and grew its engineering team to more than 450 people during its time there, according to a release. He and Instagram’s other co-founder, Kevin Systrom, recently created the personalized news app Artifact and sold it to Yahoo.

This time last year, Anthropic had only rolled out the first version of its chatbot, without any consumer access or much fanfare. It is one of the hottest AI startups today, with a product that directly competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the enterprise and consumer world. Krieger’s hiring is likely aimed at bolstering that competition.

The generative AI startup is the company behind Claude, one of the chatbots that, like ChatGPT and OpenAI Google‘s Gemini, has gained popularity over the past year.

“Mike will oversee Anthropic’s engineering, management and product design efforts as we work to expand our suite of enterprise applications and introduce Claude to a broader audience,” Anthropic said in a statement .

The announcement of Krieger’s hiring follows Anthropic’s launch of its first enterprise offering and iOS app earlier this month. And in March, Anthropic announced Claude 3, a suite of AI models that it says is the fastest and most powerful yet.

Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI research leaders, and its backers include Google, Selling power And Amazon. It closed five different financing deals totaling about $7.3 billion over the past year.

Krieger will lead Anthropic’s latest initiatives.

The company’s new enterprise plan, dubbed Team, has been in development for the past few quarters and involved beta testing with between 30 and 50 customers across various industries, such as technology, financial services, legal services and healthcare, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told CNBC in an interview earlier this month.

Anthropic’s first iOS app is free for users on all plans and also debuted this month. It allows synchronization with web chats and the ability to upload photos and files from a smartphone. There are also plans to launch an Android app.

The generative AI field has exploded over the past year, with a record $29.1 billion invested in nearly 700 deals in 2023, an increase of more than 260% in value transactions compared to the previous year, according to PitchBook. It’s become the hottest phrase during company earnings calls quarter after quarter.

Academics and ethicists have expressed serious concerns about technology’s tendency to propagate bias. But despite this, it quickly made its way into schools, online travel, the medical industry, online advertising and much more.