Mike Krieger
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And then the tech team's actually bit into it with the open mouth. It's kind of a gross metaphor. But they went all in. And then they got it shipped. And I'll routinely text. So Justin was our Android lead. He's at Anthropic now. He actually came here before I did. And I'll find little details. And he's like, oh, they kept.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I spent a lot of time with this 3D spinning animation when you got to a new reading level. It's way too much time when this like, beautiful reflection, specular highlighting thing. It's probably misprioritized that week, but they kept it. But now it goes, yeah, when you do it, I was like, that's pretty on brand. It was a really fascinating experience, but it gets to live on.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And I think it will probably have a very different future than what we were envisioning. But I think some of the core ideas are there on like, hey, what would it mean to actually try to create a personalized news system that was really decoupled from any kind of existing follow graph or what you were seeing already on something like Facebook.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It was this optimization function. I would say the three variables were like, like deal was attractive or attractive enough. Our personal commitments post, you know, transition were, were pretty light, which I liked. And they had reached like Yahoo news because like a hundred million monthly still. So it was like reach minimal commitment, but enough that we felt like it could be successful.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And then like, they were like in the right space, at least on the bid size.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, Deceptively is still huge. I think under new leadership and with a lot of excitement there. And, you know, for me, it was it really changed. It was not like a huge exit or like I would not call it a super successful outcome.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But the fact that I feel like that chapter closed in a nice way and then we could like move on without like wondering if we should have done something different when we closed it. Like it just I slept much better at night. The Q1 of this year because of it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Well, the top level decision was what to do next at all. I admit to having a bit of like an identity crisis at the beginning of the year of like, I only really know how to start companies and actually more specific. I probably only know how to start companies with Kevin. Like we make a very good co-founder pair. And I was looking at it like, what are the aspects of that that I like?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I like knowing the team from day one. I like having a lot of autonomy. I like having partners that I really trust. I like working on big problems with a lot of like open space. And at the same time, I was like, I do not want to start another company right now. Just went through the ringer on that three years. Did an okay outcome. It wasn't the outcome we wanted.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And I was sat there going, I want to work on interesting problems at scale at a company that I started, but I don't want to start a company. I kind of swirled a bit. I was like, what do I do next? And I definitely knew I did not want to just invest. Not that investing is a just thing, but it's just different. I'm like a builder at heart, as you all know. And so I was like,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
this is going to be really hard. Maybe I need to take some time and then start a company. And then I got introduced to the Anthropic folks via the head of design here, who's somebody I actually built my very, very first iPhone app with in college. So I've known him for a long time. His name is Joel. I started talking to them, and I realized they
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
research team here is incredible, but the product efforts were so nascent that, you know, I'm not going to kid myself that I'm coming in as a co-founder, like the company's around for a couple of years. They were like already like sort of company values and the way things are working and they call themselves ants. Maybe I would have advocated for a different like employee nickname, but it's fine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
That ship has sailed. But I felt like there was a lot of product greenfield here and a lot of things to be done and built. So there was that comment. It was the closest combination I could have imagined to
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
the team I would have wanted to have built had I been starting a company, enough to do, so much to do that I wake up every day both excited and daunted by how much there is to do, and already momentum and scale so I could feel like I was going to hit the ground running on something that had a bit of tailwinds, where I felt like a lot of Artifact were headwinds somewhat outside of our control, and that was the combination.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
The first one was big decision, what do I do next? Then the second one was like, all right, Is Anthropic the right place for it? And it was the sort of thing where every single conversation I'd have with them, I'd go back to them and be like, I think this could be it. I wasn't thinking about joining a company that's already running like crazy, but I want to be close to the core AI tech.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I want to be working on interesting problems. I want to be building, but I want it to feel like as close-ish to a co-founder kind of situation as I could.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And I think Daniela, who's the president here, maybe was trying to sell me, but she's like, you feel like the eighth co-founder that we never had that was like our product co-founder, which is amazing that they have seven co-founders and none of them are like the product co-founder. But whatever it was, it sold me. And I was like, all right, I'm going to jump back in.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
The Pete Best event. I hope not. At least the Ringo that comes in later.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I have some of these conversations with my good friends as a musician down in LA. And like, you know, he comes up to the bear and he's on tour and we'll have like,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
one hour deep conversation over pupusas over like what is you know ai and music and how do these things connect and where do these things go and i think it was those interesting insights on like what parts of the creative process or which pieces of creative output are most affected right now and then you can kind of play that and see how that's going to change i think that question is a big part about why i ended up in the anthropic if i was going to be an ai i think a couple of things like
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
obviously the written word is really important and like there's so much that happens in text.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I definitely do not mean to make this sound like text is less creative than others, but the fact that they've chosen, I guess we've chosen to really focus on text and image understanding and like keep it to text out and text out that is like supposed to be, you know, something that is like tailored to you rather than reproducing something that's already out there, I think reduces some of that space significantly where you're not also trying to produce like
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Hollywood type videos or, you know, high fidelity images or sounds and music. And some of that I think is a research focus. Some of that's a product focus, but I think that also the space of thorny questions is still there, but also a bit more limited in those domains or outside of those domains and more purely on text and code and those kinds of expressions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
So that was a strong sort of contributor to me wanting to be here versus other spots.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Scraping the web. We respect robots.txt. We have a few other data sources that we license and work with folks kind of separately for that. Let's say the majority of it is web crawl done in a web crawl respectful way.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We were respecting robots.txt beforehand. And then in the cases where, for whatever reason, it wasn't getting picked up correctly, we've since corrected that as well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Are you scraping those sites? Yeah, no. When I think about the players in this space, there are times where I'm like, oh, it must be nice being inside Met. I don't actually know if they trade on Instagram content or if they talk about that, but there's a lot of good stuff in there. And same with YouTube. A close friend of mine is at YouTube.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
That's like the repository of collective knowledge of how to fix any dishwasher in the world. And people ask that kind of stuff. So we'll see over time what those end up looking like.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I knocked it on the way out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think it's very use case dependent. And like what the kind of question that we drove our Instagram team insane with is we would always ask them like, well, what problem are you solving? And like, general like text box interface that can answer any question is like a technology and like the beginnings of a product, but it's not like a precise problem that you are solving.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And I think grounding yourself in that maybe helps you get to that answer, which is like if what you're trying to build, for example, like I use cloud all the time for like code assistance, like that is solving a direct problem, which is I'm trying to like ramp up on product management here and like get our products like underway and like also like work on a bunch of different things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And to the extent that I have any time to be in like pure build mode, I want to be really efficient on it. Like that very directly connected problem and like total game changer, just see myself as a builder. And like, it lets me focus on different pieces as well. I'm talking to somebody right before this call as well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Like they are now using cloud a bunch to soften up or otherwise change their like long missives on Slack before they send them. And so like this like human editor kind of piece. Like, that solves their, like, kind of immediate problem. Maybe they need to, like, tone down and, like, take a, you know, chill out a little bit before sending a Slack.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But, like, I think, again, grounding it in use, because that's what I'm trying to really focus on our products here. It's, like, if you try to boil the ocean, I think you end up in actually really adjacent to these kinds of, like, most ethical questions that you raise, which is, like, if you're an anything box, then, like, everything is, like, you know, potentially complicated.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
either under threat or adjacent or problematic. I think there's real value to saying, all right, what are the things we want to be known to be good for? I'd argue today that the product actually does serve some of those well enough that it's like, I'm happy it exists and I think folks are in general.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Then I think over time, if you look at things like writing assistance more broadly for novel length writing, I think the jury's still out on that. My wife was doing a prototype version of that. I've talked to other folks. I think our models are quite good, but they're not great at keeping track of characters over book length pieces or reproducing particular things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I would ground that in, what can we be good at now? Then let's, as we move into new use cases, navigate those carefully in terms of who is actually using it and are we providing value to the right folks in that exchange?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah. I think to ground in the TikTok example as well, I think there's also an aspect where if you imagine the future of TikTok, probably most people say, well, maybe they'll add more features and I'll use it even more. I don't even know what the average time spent is. It definitely eclipsed whatever we ever had on Instagram.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, right. Exactly. Full-on TikTok. Build AGI, create universal prosperity so we can spend time on TikTok would not be my preferred future outcome, but I guess you could construct that if you wanted to. But I think the future feels, I would argue, a bit more knowable in the TikTok use case. And I think in the
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
In the AI use case, it's a bit more like, well, where does this accelerate, you know, to and where does this eventually complement me? Where does it supersede me? And I think I would posit that a lot of the sort of AI related anxiety can be tied to that sort of like the fact that like three or four years ago, this technology was radically different.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Three or four years ago, like TikTok existed and it was already there. you know, kind of on that trajectory. And even if it wasn't there, you could kind of have imagined it from where YouTube and Instagram were. And if they had like an interesting baby with Vine, like it might've created TikTok. So I think it is partially because the platform is so entertaining. I think that's a piece.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think the like connection to real people is an interesting one. And I'd like, I'd love to like spend more time on that one. So I think that's an interesting kind of piece of the AI ecosystem. And then the last piece is just like the knowability of where it goes or like probably the three that it grounds it more.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Matt Levine has a great, it's a universal sorting function where it's actually just going to distill it on either side.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, deeply. And I saw it in a week, too. So I'm a ship-oriented person. Even with Instagram, early days, it was like, let's not get bogged down in building the 50 features, let's build the two things well and get it out as soon as possible. Some of those decisions to ship a week earlier and not have every feature, I think were actually existential to the company. I feel that in my bones.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Week two I was here, our research team put out a paper on interpretability of our models and kind of buried in the paper was this idea that they found a feature inside one of the models that if amplified would make Claude believe it was the Golden Gate Bridge.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Not just like kind of believe it, like prompt it, like, hey, you're the Golden Gate Bridge, but like deeply, like in the way that my five-year-old- We'll make everything about turtles. It made everything about the Golden Gate Bridge. How are you today? I'm feeling great. I'm feeling international orange. And I'm feeling in the foggy cloud of San Francisco.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And somebody in our Slack was like, hey, should we build and release Golden Gate Cloud? It was almost like an offhand comment. And a few of us were like, Absolutely, yes. For two reasons. One, this was actually quite fun. But two, getting people to actually have some firsthand contact with what a model that has had some of its parameters tuned, we thought was valuable.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
So from that IRC message to having GoldenGate clawed out on the website was, I think, basically 24 hours. And in that time, we had to do some product engineering, some model work. But we also ran through a whole battery of safety evals. And I think that was just an interesting piece where you can move quickly, and not every time can you do only a 24-hour safety valve.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
There's lengthier ones for new models. This one was a derivative, so it was easier. But the fact that that wasn't even a question like, wait, should we run safety valves? No, absolutely. That's what we do before we launch models. We make sure that it's both safe from the things that we know about, and let's also model out what are some novel harms.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
The bridge is unfortunately associated with suicides. Like, let's make sure that the model doesn't guide people in that direction. And if it does, let's put in the right safeguards. So that's kind of a, like, trivial example because it was like an Easter egg we shipped for basically two days and then wound down. But it was, like, very much at its core there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Even as we prepare model launches, again, I have the urgency, like, let's get it out. Like, I want to see people use it. And then you, like, actually do the timeline. We're like, well, from the point where the model is ready to the point where it's released, like, there are things that we are going to want to do to make sure that we're in line with our responsible scaling policy.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
What I appreciate about the product and the research teams here is that it's not seen as standing in our way. It's like, yeah, that's why this company exists. I don't know if I should share this, but I'll share it anyway. At our second all-in since I was here,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Somebody who's very early here stood up and was like, if we succeeded at our mission, but the company failed, I would see this as a good outcome. I don't think you would hear that. You definitely would not hear that at Instagram. Not because we were bad people, but if we succeeded in helping people see the world in a more beautiful visual way, but the company failed, I would be super bummed.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think a lot of people here would be very bummed too, but that ethos is quite unique.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Broadly, we have our research teams. We have the team that sits most closely between research and product, which is a team thinking about inference and model delivery and everything that it takes to actually serve these models, because that ends up being the most complex part in a lot of cases. And then we have product.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I would say if you just sliced off the product team, it would look similar to product teams that You know, most tech companies with a couple of tweaks. One is we have a labs team, and the purpose of that team is to basically stick them in as early in the research process as possible with designers and engineers to start prototyping at the source rather than wait until research is done.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think I can go into why I think that's a good idea. That's the team that got spun up right after I joined. And then the other team we have is our research PM teams, because ultimately we're delivering the models using these different services. And the models have capabilities like what they can see well, you know, in terms of multimodal or
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
what type of text they understand, even understanding what languages are they need to be good at. Having end user feedback tie in all the way back to research ends up being very important. And it prevents it from ever becoming this like, almost like ivory tower. Like we built this model and it's like, is it actually useful? Like we say we're good at code. Are we really?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
How are startups that are using it for code giving us feedback on, oh, it's good at like these Python use cases. It's not good at this autonomous thing. Great. Like, That's feedback that's going to channel right back in. So those are the two distinct pieces.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But within product, and I guess a click down, because I know you get really interested on Decoder, on team structures, we have apps, which is Cloud AI, Cloud for Work. And we have developers, which is the API. And then we have our Kuki Labs team.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, that's aside on the actual models. And that's everything from researching model architectures, figuring out how these models scale, and then a strong red teaming safety alignment team as well. And that's another component that is deeply in research. And I think some of the best researchers end up gravitating towards that as they see that's the most important thing they could work on.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We're north of 700 at last count.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Product is really, I think, probably, I wouldn't say doubled, but almost doubled. Product is just north of 100. So the rest is, you know, everything between. We have sales as well, but research, like the fine-tuning part of research, inference, and then the safety and scaling pieces as well. So I described this within a month of joining as those crabs that have one super big claw.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We're really big on research, and product is this very small claw still. Or the other metaphor I've been using is you're a teenager. Some of your limbs have grown faster than others, and some are still catching up. The kind of... crazier bet is I would love for us to not have to then double the product team.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I'd love for us instead to find ways of using Cloud to make us more effective at everything we do on products so that we don't have to double. Because every team struggles with this, so this is not a novel observation. But I look back at Instagram, When I left, we were 500 engineers. Were we more productive than at 250? Almost certainly not.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Were we more productive than at like 125 to 250 marginally? You know, I had a really depressing interview once when I was trying to hire a VP of Engine. I was like, how do you think about developer efficiency and like team growth?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And he's like, well, if every single person I hire is at least like net contributing, like something that's succeeding, even if it's like sub number, like a one to one ratio or before, I'm like, That's depressing. And I think it creates all this other swirl around just team culture dilution, et cetera. So that's something I'm personally passionate about.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
How do we take what we know about how these models work and actually make it so the team can stay smaller and more tight-knit?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I would probably put it in three places. One is in the actual model training and fine-tuning, where part of what we do on the reinforcement learning side is saying we'd like to find a constitution for how we think Cloud should be in the world. And that gets baked into the model itself early, before you hit the system prompt, before people are interacting with it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
That's getting encoded into that around how should it behave? Should it be willing to answer and be willing to chime in on where should it not be. And that's, I think, very linked to the responsible scaling piece. Then next is in the actual system prompt. So we actually, in the spirit of transparency, just started publishing our system prompts.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
People would always figure out clever ways to try to reverse them anyway, and we're like, if that's going to happen, why don't we just actually treat it like a changelog? So just be transparent. So it's, I think this is last week, you can go online and you actually see what we've changed.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
That's another place where there's like additional kind of guidance that we give to the model around how it should act. Of course, like ideally it gets baked in earlier. People can always find ways to try to get around it, but with We're fairly good at preventing jailbreaks. And then the last piece is where our trust and safety team sits.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And that's, you know, the trust and safety team is the closest team. At Instagram, we called it at one point trust and safety, another point well-being, but that same kind of like last mile remediation piece. And I would kind of bucket that work into two pieces. One is what are people doing with Claude and publishing out to the world? So with Artifact's
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It was like the first product we had that any amount of social thing at all, which is like you could create an article, in fact, hit share, and actually put that on the web. And... That's a very common problem in shared content. I lived shared content for almost 10 years at Instagram, and here it was like, wait, do people have usernames? How do they get reported?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We delayed that launch for a week and a half to make sure we had the right TNS, trust and safety pieces around moderation, reporting, cues around taking it down, limited distribution, figuring out what it means for the people on Teams plans versus individuals. Some of those things where I got very excited, like, let's ship this, sharing artifacts.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
a week later, we're like, okay, now we can ship it. We've got to actually sort these things out. So that's on the content moderation side, I would say. And then on the response side as well, we also have additional pieces that sit there that are either around preventing the model from reproducing copyrighted content. That's something that we want to prevent as well from the completions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And then other harms that are against the way we think the model should behave and ideally have been caught earlier, but if they aren't, then they can get caught at that last mile. So it's like our head of trust and safety was talking to him last week.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
He calls it the Swiss cheese method, which is like no one layer will catch everything, but ideally enough layer stack will catch a lot of it before it reaches the end.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, it really is. And the feedback we've gotten post shutdown for Artifact was, you know, it's a mixture of sadness, but also kudos for calling it when you saw it. And I think that there's value to also having a moment where you say, you know, we've seen enough here. I think for us, it was the product I still love and miss. And in fact, like I will run into people and I'll be like,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, and I would maybe split internal to Anthropic and just what I've just seen out in the world. The Grok image generation stuff that came out like two weeks ago was fascinating. Cause it was almost like, you know, cause I think there was a, maybe they've introduced some, but at launch it felt like there was almost, it was a total free for all.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It's like, do you want to see Kamala with a machine gun? It was like, it was, you know, crazy stuff. I go between believing that like actually having examples like that in the world are actually helpful and almost like inoculating, like what you take for granted as a photograph or not, you know, or even a video or not. I don't think we're far from that as well. And like getting, you know,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Maybe it's calling the Denver post or like a trusted source, or maybe it's like creating some hierarchy of trust that we can go after. You know, I don't, there's no easy answers there as well, but like, that's, I would say like. A industry, almost like a society-wide thing that we're going to reckon with as well, like the image and video pieces.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And then on text, I think what changes with AI is the mass production. So one thing that we look at is any type of coordinated effort. We looked at this as well at Instagram. At individual levels, it might be hard to catch the one person that's like...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
commenting on a, you know, Facebook group, trying to start some stuff, you know, cause that's probably indistinguishable from a human, but we'll really look for like networks of coordinated activity.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And we've started, not started, we've been doing the same as well on the Anthropic side, which is looking at, this is going to happen more on thing on the API side, if it happens rather than on cloud.ai, I think there's just more effective, efficient ways of doing things scaled. But when we see spikes in activity, that's when we can go in and say, all right, like, what does this end up looking?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Let's go learn more about this particular API customer, you know, Do we need to have a conversation with them? What are they actually doing? What is the use case?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think it's important to like be clear as a company, like what you consider bugs versus features, you know, and like, it would be an awful outcome if anthropic models were being used for any kind of like coordination of fake news and, you know, election interference type things. And so we've got the TNS teams actively working on that. And to the extent that like,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
we find anything like that'll be a combo, additional model parameters, plus trust and safety to shut it down.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I would expect them to say, I love Instagram. They're always like, I love Anthropic. Like, Artifact. I really miss Artifact. So we had a resonance with a too small but very passionate group of folks. But we'd been working on it kind of in the kind of full run of it about three years. And the product had been out for a year.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And we were looking at the metrics, looking at growth, looking at what we had done. And we kind of had a moment where we said, are there ideas or kind of product directions that we'll feel dumb not having tried before calling it? And we had a list of those, and that was kind of mid last year.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, I think the information piece, like living in a society with this amount of internal, without AI already, I think there's already just take textual, primarily textual social media. I think some of that happens on Instagram as well, but it's easier to disseminate when it's just you know, a piece of text that you can rub has already been like a journey, I would say, in the last 10 years.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But I think it comes and goes. I think we go through waves of like, oh, man, this is like, how are we ever going to get to truth? And then good truth tellers emerge. And I think people flock to them. And I think some of them are traditional, like sources of authority. And some of it are just people that have become trusted. And then you
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We can get into separate conversation on verification and validation of identity, but I think that's an interesting one as well. But I think I'm an optimistic person at heart if you can't tell. And I think that part of it is my belief from an information sort of, you know, chaos or proliferation piece of our abilities to both learn, adapt, and then grow the right mechanisms in place.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
So I remain optimistic that we'll continue to figure it out on that front. The AI component, I think, increases the volume. And the thing you would have to believe is that it could also increase some of the parsing. I'm going to say it was a Neil Stevenson novel that came out a few years ago. It was a William Gibson one. It was one of the two. Two of them had a
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
The concept of in the future, perhaps you'll have a social media editor of your own and that gets deployed as a sort of gating function between all the stuff that's out there and what you end up consuming. There's some appeal to that to me, which is if there's a massive amount of data to consume, probably not most of it is going to be useful to you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And I've even been trying to scale back my own information diet. And to the extent that there are things that are interesting, you know, I'd love the idea of, like, go read this thing in depth. Like, this is worthwhile for you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think an interesting question is – and I don't know what the current – to ask Adam Massuri what he would say, like what percentage of Instagram content could, would, and should be, you know, AI generator, at least AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And we basically took the rest of the year to work through those, got to the end of the year and said, yeah, those moved the needle a little bit, but not enough to convince us that this was really on track to be something that the team and we were collectively going to spend a lot of time on over the coming years. And that was the right moment to say, all right, let's pause, let's step back.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, there's there's on the research side and now outside my expertise, like active work on like, what are the techniques that could make it more detectable? Is it watermarking? Is it probability, et cetera? And I think but open question, but also open are like very active area of research as well. I think the other piece is well, actually, I would break down a three.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
There's like what we can do from like like detection and watermarking, etc. side, on the model piece, also have it be able to express some uncertainty a little bit better. You know, like, I actually don't know about this. I'm not willing to speculate, or I'm not actually willing to help you filter these things out, because I'm not sure. I can't tell which of these things are true. And
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
also open area of research and a very interesting one as well. And then the last one is like, if you're Meta, if you're Google, maybe the bull case is that if primarily you're surfacing content that is generated by models that you yourself are building, there is probably a better closed loop than you can have there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I don't know if that's going to play out or whether people will always just flock to whatever the most interesting image generation model and create it and go publish it and blow that up. I'm not sure. Well, I think that jury's still out on that one.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But I would believe that the built-in tools, like Instagram, 90 plus percent of photos that were filtered were filtered inside the app because it's just the most convenient thing. And in that way, a closed ecosystem could be one route to at least having some verifiability of generated content.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
a coach I was working with, I would always push him like, well, like I want to have, I want to start another company that has as much impact as Instagram. And he's like, well, like there's no cosmic ledger where you'll know exactly what impact you have, first of all. And second of all, like what's the equation by like positive or negative.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
this the right time to shut it down and the answer was yes it's actually if you haven't seen the yahoo yahoo basically bought it took all the code and redid yahoo news as artifact or the other way around and it's it's very funny like you'll you'll have a little bit of like a bizarre world moment the first thing like this is almost exactly like artifact a little bit more purple some different sources but yeah it was it was definitely the right decision and like
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And I think like the right way to approach these questions is with humility and then an understanding as things, as things develop. But I, you know, to me it was, I am excited and overall very optimistic about AI and the potential for AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
If I'm going to be actively working on it, I want it to be somewhere where the risks and the mitigations were as important and as foundational to the founding story, maybe to bring it back to why I joined. That's how I balanced it for myself, which is you need to have that internal run loop of, great, is this the right thing to launch? Should we launch this? Should we change it in some ways?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Should we add some constraints? Should we explain its limitations in some ways? I think it's essential that we grapple with those questions, or else I think you'll end up in the, well, this is clearly just a force for good. Let's blow it up and go all the way out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I feel like that misses, having seen it at Instagram, you can build a commenting system, but you also need to build the bullying filter that we built.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Actually, maybe I'll go meta for a quick second, which is the culture here at Anthropic is extremely thoughtful and very document writing oriented. So if a decision needs to be made, there's usually a document behind it. There's pros and cons to that. It means that as I joined and I was wondering, like, why did we choose to do this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
People would be like, oh, yeah, there's a doc for that, you know, and there's literally a doc for everything. And then, which helped my ramp up. But sometimes I'd be like, why have we still not built this? They're like, oh, yeah. Somebody wrote a doc about that two months ago. I'm like, well, did we do anything about it? My whole decision-making piece is I want us to get to truth faster.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
None of us individually know what's right. Getting to truth could be, let's de-risk the technical side by building a technical prototype. If it's on the product side, let's get it into somebody's hands. Figma mockups are great, but how is it going to move on the screen? And so minimizing time to iteration and time to hypothesis testing is my fundamental decision-making philosophy.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I've tried to install more of that here on the product side. Again, it's a thoughtful, very deliberate culture. I don't want to lose...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
most of that but i do want there to be sort of more of this uh hypothesis testing and validation components and i think people feel it when they're like oh yeah we had been debating this for a while but like we actually built it and it turns out neither of us were right and actually there's a third direction that's that's more correct at instagram we went through sort of we ran the gamut of uh strategy frameworks the one that's resonated the most with me consistently is playing to win um i go back to that often and i've instilled some of that here as well as we start thinking about you know like
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
What's the winning aspiration? Where are we going after? And then more specifically, and we touched upon this in even our conversation today, where will we play? Because we're not the biggest team by size. We're not the biggest chat UI by usage. We're not the biggest AI model by usage either. We've got a lot of interesting players in the space.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We have to be thoughtful about where we play and where we invest. So, yeah. And then... This morning I had a meeting where like the first 30 minutes were people being in pain due to a strategy. And the cliche is like strategy should be painful. And people forget the second part of that is that then you will feel pain when the strategy like creates some tradeoffs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But also just recognizing that like, you know, on Instagram we always talked about doing fewer things better. That was like a foundational company value.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
The trade-off was, not getting too much into the technical details, is basically, like, of the next generation of models, like, what particular optimizations we're making. And, you know, can't share exactly what, but, like, it will make one thing really good and another thing just, like, okay or pretty good.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And, like, the thing that's really good, I think, is a big bet and it's going to be really exciting. And everybody's like, yeah. And they're like, but... Yeah, but so I'm actually having us write a little mini document that we can all sign. I know this sounds kind of cheesy, where it's like, we are making this trade-off. This is the implication.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
You know it's a good decision when you step back. And the thing you regret is it didn't work out, not that you had to make that decision or that you made that exact decision at the time that you did.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
This is how we'll know we're right or wrong, and here's how we're going to revisit this decision. And I want us all to at least cite it in Google Docs and be like, this is our joint commitment to this, or else you end up with the next week of like... But, you know, it's that revisit. So it's like, it's not even disagree and commit. It's like, feel the pain, understand it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Don't go blindly into it forever. Like I'm a big believer when it comes to like hard decisions, even decisions that can feel like two-way doors. The problem with two-way doors is it's tempting to keep walking back and forth between them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
So you have to kind of like walk through the door and say, the earliest I'd be willing to go back the other way is, you know, two months from now or with this particular piece of information. And hopefully that kind of quiets the like, even internal critic of like, It's a two-way door. I'm always going to want to go back there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think current generation, yes, in some areas, no, in others. I think maybe what makes me an interesting product person here is that I really believe in our researchers, but default belief is everything takes longer in life and in general and in research and in engineering than we think it does. I do this mental exercise with the team, which is,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
If our research team like got Rip Van Winkle all fell asleep for like five years, I still think we'd have five years of product roadmap. And we'd be like, we are bad at our jobs. We're terrible at our jobs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We can't think of all the things that even in our current models could do in terms of improving work, accelerating coding, making things easier, coordinating work, even intermediating disputes between people, which I think is a funny LLM use case that like we've even seen play out internally around like.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
These two people have this belief, like help us even ask each other the right questions to get us to that place. So it's just a good sounding board as well. Like there's a lot in there that is embedded in the current models.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I would agree with you that like the big open questions to me, I think it's basically like for longer horizon tasks, what is the sort of horizon of independence that you can and are willing to give the model? Like the metaphor I've been using is right now, LLM chat is very much, you've got to do the back and forth because you have to correct, you know, you've got to iterate.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
No, that's not quite what I meant. I meant this. A good litmus test for me is like, when can I email Claude and generally expect that an hour later, it's not going to give me the answer it would have given me in the chat, which would have been a failure, but like it would have done more interesting things and gone find out things and iterate on them and even like self-critiqued and then responded.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And like that, I don't think we're that far for some domains. I think we're far from some other ones, especially ones that involve sort of like either people longer range planning or thinking or research. But I use that as sort of my capabilities piece. It's like less like, you know, parameter size or like a particular eval. And to me, it's like, again, what problem are you solving?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And right now it's like, I joke with our team. It's like right now talking to Claude is like, a very intelligent amnesiac. It's like every time you start a new conversation, it's like, wait, who are you again? Like, what am I here for? Like, what did we work on before? And it's like, instead, it's like, all right, like, can we carry continuity?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Can we like have it be able to plan and execute on a longer horizon? And can you start trusting it to get some more things in? Because there's things I do every day that I'm like, I spent an hour on, you know, some stuff that I'd really wish I didn't have to do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And it's not like particularly leveraged use of my time, but I don't think Claude could quite do it right now without like a lot of scaffolding. And right now, here's maybe like a more succinct way to put a bow on it. Like right now, the scaffolding needed to get it to execute more complex tasks doesn't always feel worth the trade-offs because you probably could have done it yourself.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think there's an XCD comic on like time spent automating something versus time that you actually get to save doing it. Like that trade-off is at different points on the AI curve. And I think that would be the bet is can we shorten that time to value so that you can trust it to do more of those things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Like, you know, probably nobody really gets excited to put a, you know, coalesce all the planning documents that my product teams are working on into one document, write the meta narrative and like circulate to these three people. Like, man, I don't want to do that today. I have to do it today, but I don't want to do it today.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think that's an interesting way of asking. The way I think about it is the LLMs today deliver value, but they also deliver our ability or help our ability to go build a thing that delivers that value.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
To me, it's like, it's right now, Claude is an assistant and, you know, the helpful kind of sidekick is the word I heard it internally at some point. She's like, at what point is it a coworker? Because like the joint amount of work that can happen in, even in a growing economy, with assistance, I think, is very, very large. So I think a lot about, you know, we have Cloud for Work.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Cloud for Work right now is a sort of almost a tool for thought. You can put in documents, you can sync things and have conversations and people find value. Somebody built a, like, small, like, fission reactor or something. It was on Twitter. I was like, not using Cloud, but Cloud was their, you know, their tool for thought. To the point where, like,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
it is now an entity that you actually trust to execute autonomous work within the company. That delivered product, it sounds like a fanciful idea. I actually think the delivery of that product is way less sexy than people think. It's about permission management. It's about identity. It's about coordination. It's about remediation of issues.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It's all the stuff that you actually do in training a good person to be good at their jobs. That, to me, even within a particular discipline...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
some coding tasks, some particular tasks that involve coalescing of information or researching, each of those, getting to have the incremental person on your team, even if they're not, in this case, I'm okay with not net plus one productive, but net 0.25, but maybe there's a few of them, and coordinated. I get very excited about the economic potential for that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I had this debate with somebody around, I think the price point for that is much higher if you're delivering that kind of value. But I was debating with somebody around, you know, what Snowflake and Databricks and those have shown, like, Datadog is another one. Like, usage-based billing is, like, you know, the new hotness.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
If we had, like, subscription billing, now we have, like, usage-based billing. And, like, the thing I would like to get us to, it's hard to quantify today, although maybe we'll get there, is, like, a real value-based billing. Like, what did you actually accomplish with this? And... You know, there's people that will ping us because like a common complaint I hear is that people hit our rate limits.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
They're like, I want more cloud. I saw somebody who like, well, I have two clouds. I have like two different browser windows. I'm like, God, we got to do a better job here. But the reason they're willing to do that, they write in and they say like, look, I'm like working on a brief for a client. They are paying me X, you know, amount of money.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I would happily pay another $100 to get me to finish the thing so I can deliver it on time and move on to the next one. That, to me, is an early sign of where we fit, where we can provide value that is even beyond a $20 subscription.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But when I think about deployed clods, and this is early product thinking, but it's things I get excited about, being able to think about what value are you delivering and really align over time is the way where I think it just creates a very... full alignment of incentives there in terms of delivering that product. So that's, I think that's an area we can get to over time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, I love the question. I get asked this all the time, even internally, like, what should we be pushing harder into like an on device experience? And I agree, it's gonna be hard to supersede the built in model provider there, you know, even if our model might be better particular use case, there's like a utility thing I get more excited about.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Can we be better at being close to your work and like work products have a much better history than the built in sort of thing like pages comes with and plenty of people do their work on pages. I hear I don't know, but like, you know, there's still a real value for a Google Docs or even a notion and other people that can go deep on a particular like.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I would agree with the assessment, maybe different root causes. I think what we saw, some sites were able to balance kind of a mix of subscription, tasteful ads, good content. I would put The Verge at the top of that list. I'm not just saying that. I'm talking to you. Legitimately, every time we linked to a Verge story from Artifact, somebody clicked through.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
sort of take on that sort of productivity piece. So I think it's why I lean us heavier, more into help people get things done. And some of that will be mobile, but almost maybe as a companion and, uh, provide and deliver value that is almost like independent of needing to be exactly integrated into the desktop. I think as an independent company, trying to be that, like that first call that Siri.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I've heard the pitch from startups even before I joined here, like, we're going to do that. We're going to be so much better. And the new action button means that you can bring it up and then press up. I'm like, no, the default really, really matters there. Instagram never tried to replace the camera.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We just tried to make a really good thing about what you could do once you decided that you wanted to do something novel with that photo. And then sure, people took photos in there. But by the end, when we left, it was like, 85% library, 15% camera, right? Like there's a real value to like the thing that just requires the one click.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
So it was interesting because, you know, every WWDC that would come around, pre-Instagram, I loved watching those announcements. I was like, well, what are they going to announce? And then like a change is like, oh, what are they going to announce? You get to the point where you realize they're going to be really good at some things. Google's going to be great at some things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Apple's going to be great at some things. You have to find the places where you can differentiate either in a cross-platform way, either in a depth of experience way, either in a novel take on how work gets done way, or be willing to do the kind of work that some companies are less excited to do because maybe at the beginning they don't seem super scalable.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I mean, I open up the App Store and ChatGPT is regularly second. I don't know what their numbers look like in terms of that business, but I think it's like pretty healthy right now. But long-term, I think it's, yeah. I actually, I optimistically believe yes, because I think they, even on a like,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Let's conflate mobile and consumer for a second, which is not a super fair conflation, but I'm going to go with it for a second, which is so much of our lives still happen there that whether it's within LLM plus recs recommendations or LLM plus shopping or LLMs plus even dating, I have to believe that at least a heavy AI component can be in a $7 billion plus business, but not one where you are trying to effectively be...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
like Siri++. I think that's a hard place to be.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah. It's not on my mind for any kind of near-term thing. I'm very curious to see. I haven't gotten access to it probably for good reasons, although I know Kevin real pretty well. I should just call him. So I haven't gotten to play with it. But that space of the perplexities, search, chat, GPT search? I forgot how they actually brand it. Search GPT. Search GPT.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It was like, this is a good experience. It feels like things are in balance. At the extremes, though, like local news, a lot of those websites for economic reasons have become sort of like you arrive, there's a sign in with Google before you've even read a single thing, a pop up to sign up to the newsletter. It's like before you've even consumed any content.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, I mean, it ties back to the very beginning of our conversation, which is search engines in the world of summarization and citations, but... you know probably fewer clicks and where does that end up you know how does that all tie together and connect and and it's less core i would say to what we're trying to do
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think we have a really good shot there. The two places that most recently this came up, one was we are current like LLMs will oftentimes try to do math. Sometimes they actually are, especially given the architecture, impressively good at math, but not always. And especially not when it comes to like higher order things or even things like counting letters and words.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think you could actually get there. And so one tweak we've made recently is just helping Cloud, at least on Cloud AI, recognize when it is more in that situation and explain its shortcomings. Is it perfect? No, but it significantly improved that particular thing. Because from an enterprise, then this came directly from an enterprise customer that said, hey, I was trying to do some CSV parsing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I'd rather you give me the Python to go analyze the CSV than try to do it yourself because I don't trust that you're going to do it right yourself. So I think on the data analysis, code interpretation, that front, I think it's a combination of having the tools available. LLMs are very smart. Sorry, humans. I still use calculators all the time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
In fact, over time, I feel like I get worse at mental math and like rely on those even more. So I think there's a lot of value to, hey, give it tools, teach it to use tools, which is a lot of what the research team focuses on. And then really emphasize the time where like, yeah, I know you think you can do this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
The joke I do is, like, the CSV version is, like, yeah, I can eyeball a column of numbers and give you, like, my average. It's probably not going to be perfectly right. So I'd rather, like, use the, you know, average function. So that's on the data front.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
On the citations front, the app that has done this most well recently, I have no affiliation with this other than, like, we listen to her parenting advice all the time. Which is, like, Dr. Becky, who's, like, a parenting guru, has a new app out. And I really like that. playing with chat apps because I really try to push them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think that's like probably a longer run economic question of supporting local news, probably more so than AI, at least like that trend seems like it's been happening for quite a bit. The creator piece is also really interesting where, you know, if you look at where things that are breaking news or at least like emerging stories are happening, they're often happening.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And I push this one so hard around trying to hallucinate or talk about something I wasn't familiar with. And I have to go talk to the maker. They're actually... ping them on Twitter, they do a great job of like, if it's not super confident that that information is in its sort of retrieval window, it will just refuse to answer and it won't confabulate it, it won't go there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And I think that that is an answer as well, which is like the combination of model intelligence plus data, plus the right like prompting and retrieval so that like you don't want it to answer unless there actually is something grounded in the context window helps tremendously on that hallucination front. Does it cure it? Probably not. But I would say that all of us make mistakes.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Hopefully, they're predictably shaped mistakes so you can be in like, oh, danger zone, talking outside of our piece there. I even like the idea of even having some almost syntax highlighting for like, this is rounded from my context. This is from my model knowledge. This is out of distribution, like Danger Will Robinson.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I'm not sure if this is exactly where I'm like, I'm not exactly sure what I'm talking about. Maybe there's something there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It's a huge adjustment. I'm an engineer at heart. I like determinism in general. We had an insane issue at Instagram that we eventually tracked down to using non-EZC RAM and literal cosmic rays were flipping RAM. When you get to that, you're like, I want to rely on my hardware. It was actually a moment maybe four weeks into this role where I was like, okay, I can see the perils and potentials.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
We were building a system in collaboration with a customer. And we talk about tool use, right? Like what the model has access to. And we had made two tools available to the model in this case. And one was a to-do list app that it could write to. And one was like a just like reminder, sort of like short-term or like timery type thing. And the to-do list system was down.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And it's like, oh man, I tried to use the to-do, I couldn't do it. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to set a timer for when you meant to be reminded about this task. And so it set an absurd timer. It was like a 48-hour timer. You would never do that on your phone. It would be ridiculous. But it, to me, showed that non-determinism also leads to creativity.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And that creativity in the face of uncertainty is ultimately how I think we are going to be able to solve these higher-order, more interesting problems. And that was the moment I was like... It's non-deterministic, but I love it. You know, it's like non-deterministic, but I can put it in these odd situations and it will do its best to recover or like act in the face of uncertainty.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It's an ex-post that went viral. And what we would often get on Artifact is the summary roundup of the reactions to the thing that happened yesterday, which if you're relying on that, you're a little bit out of the loop already. And so I think when I look at where things are happening and where the conversation is happening,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Whereas any other sort of like heuristic basis, if I had written that, I probably would never have thought of that particular workaround. But it did. And it did it in a, I think, pretty creative way. So I... I can't say it sits totally easily with me because I still like determinism and I like predictability and systems and we seek predictability where we can find it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But I think I've also seen the value of like within that constraint with the right tools and the right sort of infrastructure around it, how it could be more robust to like the like needed messiness of the real world.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, so on the cloud side, I think the time we talk and it airs, we're launching Cloud for Enterprise. So this is our push into really going deeper. It's a bunch of on-the-surface, unexciting acronyms like SSO and SCIM and data management and audit logs. But the importance of that is that you start getting to push into really deep use cases.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And we're building data integrations that make that useful as well. So there's that whole component. And then on the API side, we didn't talk as much about the API side, although I think of that as much as an important product as anything else that we're working on. The big push is, how do we get lots of data into the models?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
The models are ultimately, they're smart, but I think they're not that useful without good data in there. It's tied to the use case. How do we get a lot of data in there and make that really quick? So we launched explicit prompt caching last week, which basically lets you take a very large data store, put it in the context window, and retrieve it 10 times faster than before.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Look for those kinds of ways in which the models can be brought closer to people's actual interesting data. Again, this always ties back to Artifact and get you personalized useful answers in the moment at speed and at low cost. That whole push, I think a lot about good product design pushes extremes in some direction.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
This is the lots of data, but also push the latency extreme and see what happens when you combine those two axes. That's the thing that we'll continue pushing for the rest of the year. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
It's great to be here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
at least for the the kind of cultural kind of core piece of that conversation it's often not happening anymore on media properties it is starting somewhere else and then getting aggregated elsewhere and i think that just has a implication on a site or a product like artifact and how well you're ever going to feel like this is breaking news so over time we moved more to let's be more interest-based which
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Funny enough, Instagram, its heart was also very interest-based. Less breaking news. But can you have a product that is just that? I think that was the struggle.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Yeah, even citing newsletters is a great example where some of the best stuff that I read is, you know, sometimes there's a, you know, equivalent sub stack site that you could go look at. And some of the newsletters exist purely in email. We even set up an email account that just ingested newsletters to try to surface them, at least links from them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And it was, you know, the designing experience is not there. I'd say that the thing I noticed on the open web in general, and like as a longtime fan of the web, something that was
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
somebody who was very online before being online was like a thing that people were back in Brazil, like as a, as a, you know, preteen in a lot of ways, the incentives that have been set up around like, well, you know, a recipe won't rank highly if it's just the recipe, let's tell the story about the life that happened up to leading to that recipe.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Like those trends, I feel like have been happening for a while and already leading to a place where the end consumer might be a user, but it is being intermediated already through be it, you know, a search engine and optimized for that findability or optimized for, or what's going to get shared a bunch or what's going to get, you know, the most attention and like that flow.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I mean, newsletters are, and podcasts are two ways that have probably most successfully broken through that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And I think that's been an interesting direction, but in general, I feel like there's been probably a decade long sort of at risk for the open web in general, in terms of like, what is the actual intermediation that's happening between like, I am trying to tell a story or I'm trying to talk to somebody.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And somebody is receiving that story and all the roadblocks along the way, they just make that more and more painful. And it's no surprise then that, hey, I can actually just open my email and get the content. That feels better in some ways, although also not great in a bunch of other ways. That's how I've watched it. And I would call it not a healthy place where it is now.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think that's a really interesting assessment. Funny watching the Yahoo version of it because they've done the content deals to get the more slimmed down pages.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And though they have fewer content or fewer content sources, the experience of tapping on each individual story, I think, is a lot better because those have been now formatted for a distribution that is, I guess, linked to some paid acquisition, which is different than what we were doing, which was like, here's the open web. We'll give you warts and all and link directly to you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
But I think your assessment feels right.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
For us, it was, I mean, two things that I remained sad that we didn't get to see through. One was the idea of good recommender systems underlying multiple product verticals. So news stories being one of them, but I had the belief that maybe somebody will build out that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
If you understand yourself well through, or the system can understand you well through how you're interacting with news stories, how you're interacting with content, then is there another vertical that could be interesting? Is it around shopping? Is it around local discovery? Is it around people discovery, all these different places?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Because for all the promise, and I'll separate maybe machine learning and AI, and I realize that's a shifting definition throughout the years. Let's call for the purpose of our conversation, recommender system machine learning systems. For all their promise, my day-to-day is actually not filled with too many good instances of that product.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
The big company idea was, can we bring Instagram type product thinking to recommender systems and combine those two things in a way that creates new experiences that aren't beholden to your existing friend and follow graph, with news being an interesting place to start.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
you highlighted some good problems about the content, but the appealing part was we're not trying to solve the two-sided marketplace all at once. It turns out half that marketplace was already search-pilled and had its own problems, but at least there was the other side as well. The other piece, even within news, is really thinking about how do you eventually open this up?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think Substack is pursuing this from a very different direction, but open this up so creators can actually be writing content and understanding distribution natively on the platform. I've I feel like every platform eventually wants to get to this as well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
When you watch the closest analogs in China like Toutiao, they started very much like crawl the web, have these eventual publisher deals, and now it is, I would guess, 80-90 percent first-party content. There's economic reasons why that's nice.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And some people make their living writing articles about local news stories on Totiao, including one of our engineers, I think a sister or close family member. But the other side of it is that content can just be so much more optimized for what you're doing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
Actually, at Code, I met an entrepreneur who was creating a new novel media experience that was very, if stories met news, met mobile, what would it be for most news stories? And I think for something like that to succeed, it also needs distribution that has that as the native distribution type.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
So recommendation systems for everything, and then primarily recommendation-based first-party content writing platforms. The two ideas are like, oh, one day for somebody.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
I think there were a few things that we wanted to align. Like, I think we'd worked in that space for long enough that whatever we did, we sort of wanted to kind of tie a bow around it and move on to whatever it was next. And so that was one piece. And the other piece was, like, I wanted to see the ideas live on in some way. So, like...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
there was kind of a lot of conversations around like, well, like what would it become under like different conversations? And the Yahoo one was really interesting. And I would admit to being like pretty unaware of what they were doing beyond like, I was still using Yahoo Finance and like my fantasy football league. Um, but beyond that, it was like not familiar what they were doing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
They were like, no, no, we want to take it. And we think in two months we can relaunch it as Yahoo news. And I was thinking like, that sounds pretty crazy. Like that's a very short timeline for like, and a code base you're not familiar with. And they had our access to us and like, we were basically like helping them out almost full time, but that's still a lot.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
And, uh, they actually basically pulled it off. I think it was 10 weeks instead of eight, eight weeks. But I think there is like a newfound energy in there to be like, all right, like what are the properties we want to build back up again and and do it. So I fully admit coming in with a bit of a bias. Like, I don't know what's left at Yahoo. Like, what's going to happen here?