Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joins Amazon-backed Anthropic

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

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

Around this time last year, Anthropic only released the first version of its chatbot without user access or much fanfare. It is now one of the hottest AI startups, with a product that competes directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds. Krieger’s hiring is likely intended to strengthen that competition.

The generative AI startup is the company behind Claude, one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GoogleGemini has skyrocketed in popularity over the past year.

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

News of Krieger’s hiring follows Anthropic’s debut of its first enterprise offering and iOS app earlier this month. And in March, Anthropic announced the Claude 3, a set of AI models it says are the fastest and most powerful yet.

Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI researchers and its supporters include Google, Salesforce and Amazon. In the past year, it has completed five different financing deals totaling about $7.3 billion.

Krieger will lead Anthropic’s latest initiatives.

The company’s new plan for the business, called Team, has been in development for the past few quarters and includes beta testing with between 30 and 50 customers in 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 debuts this month. Provides synchronization with web chats and the ability to upload photos and files from a smartphone. There are also plans to launch an Android app.

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