As Anthropic tries to take on the ai giants, it has a new big-name executive on board: the company announced this morning that Mike Krieger is its new chief product officer. Krieger, of course, was one of the co-founders of instagram and spent the last few years working on Artifact, an ai-powered news-reading app that was recently acquired by Yahoo.
Krieger will oversee all of Anthropic's product efforts going forward. It's an important time for the company to push the product hard too: it recently launched the Claude app for iOS, long after many of its competitors were available on mobile devices, and just announced support for its use in Spanish, French, Italian and German. Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI employees, has apparently focused primarily on developing its core technology for the past few years, but it seems to understand that it needs to turn all that technology into products, and there's no time to waste.
Because I don't know if you've noticed, but OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and seemingly everyone else are racing as fast as possible to put ai models in everything. The underlying technology is changing rapidly and the products through which people use it are evolving even faster.
“Mike's experience developing intuitive products and user experiences will be invaluable as we create new ways for people to interact with Claude, particularly in the workplace,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement announcing the hiring. “We feel fortunate to add Mike's vision and experience to our leadership team.” That thing about the workplace is interesting: It seems like Krieger's job may be to find business-focused uses for Claude, at least at first.
The ai space is tremendously hot right now, and there are more new things and more hype practically every day. Krieger built a highly successful company in a hugely competitive landscape once before; The stakes could be even higher this time.