Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Mike Krieger, the new chief product officer at Anthropic, one of the hottest AI companies in the entire industry. Anthropic was started in 2021 by former OpenAI executives and researchers who wanted to build a more safety-minded AI company, which I have to point out is a real theme among people who leave OpenAI. Something to think about. Anthropic's main product right now is Claude, which is the name of both its industry-leading AI model and a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT. Like other major AI companies, Anthropic has billions in funding from some of the biggest names in tech, primarily Amazon. But at the same time, Anthropic does have a distinct and intense safety culture. The company is notable for employing some people who legitimately worry that AI might destroy mankind. And I wanted to ask Mike how that tension plays out in product design.
On top of that, Mike has a pretty fascinating history. If you're a longtime tech fan, you likely know him as the co-founder of Instagram. a company he started with Kevin Systrom before selling it to Facebook, now Meta, for a billion dollars back in 2012. That was an eye-popping amount of money back then, and the deal turned Mike into founder royalty basically overnight. Mike left Meta in 2018, and a few years later he started to dabble in AI, but not quite the type of AI we talk about all the time on Decoder. Instead, Mike and Kevin launched Artifact, an AI-powered newsreader that did some very interesting things with recommendation algorithms and aggregation. I was a big fan of Artifact, but ultimately it didn't take off like anyone wanted, and Mike and Kevin shut it down earlier this year. They sold the underlying tech to Yahoo. We talk a lot about decisions here on Decoder, so I wanted to know more about the decision to shut Artifact down, and then the decision to sell it to Yahoo.
And then, of course, I wanted to know why Mike decided to join Anthropic and work in AI. An industry with a lot of investment, but very few consumer products to justify it. Really, what is all of this for? What products does Mike see in the future that make all of the turmoil around AI worth it? How is he thinking about building them? I've always enjoyed talking product with Mike, and this conversation is no different, even if I'm still not really sure anyone's described what the future is going to look like. Okay, Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger, here we go. Mike Krieger, you are the new chief product officer at Anthropic. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Great to see you.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about products. The last time I talked to you, I was trying to convince you to come to the Code Conference. I didn't actually get to interview you at Code, but I was trying to convince you to come. And I was like, I just want to talk about products with someone as opposed to regulation. And you're like, yes, here's my product. I warn the audience, we're definitely going to talk a little bit about AI regulation. It's going to happen. It seems part of the puzzle. But you're building the actual products. And I have a lot of questions about what those products could be, what the products are now, where they're going.
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