January 4, 2025

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

Krieger, former chief technology officer YuanHe owned Instagram, growing the platform to 1 billion users and growing its engineering team to more than 450 people, according to a press release. He and fellow Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom recently developed the personalized news app Artifact and sold it to Yahoo.

This time last year, Anthropic had just launched the first version of its chatbot without any consumer access or fanfare. Now it’s one of the hottest artificial intelligence startups, with a product that competes directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the enterprise and consumer space. Krieger’s hiring could mean further competition.

The generative AI startup is the company behind Claude, one of the chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GoogleThe popularity of Gemini has soared in the past year.

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

Krieger was hired after Anthropic debuted its first enterprise product and iOS app earlier this month. In March of this year, Anthropic released Claude 3, a set of artificial intelligence models that it claims is the fastest and most powerful to date.

Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI research executives and its backers include Google, sales force and Amazon. Last year, the company completed five different financing transactions totaling approximately $7.3 billion.

Krieger will lead Anthropic’s latest initiatives.

The company’s new business initiative, called “Team,” has been in development for the past few quarters and involves beta testing with 30 to 50 customers in a variety of industries, including technology, financial services, legal services and healthcare, Anthropic Co-founder Daniela Amodei said in an interview with CNBC earlier this month.

Anthropic’s first iOS app is free for all plans and also debuts this month. It offers synchronization with web chats and the ability to upload photos and files from your smartphone. An Android app is also planned.

According to PitchBook data, the field of generative AI has exploded in the past year, with investment in nearly 700 deals reaching a record $29.1 billion in 2023, and deal value increasing by more than 260% from the previous year. This has become the hottest phrase on every quarterly corporate earnings call.

Academics and ethicists have expressed serious concerns about the technology’s tendency to spread bias. But even so, it quickly entered schools, online travel, medical industry, online advertising and other fields.

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