Anthropic Welcomes Instagram Co-Founder as Chief Product Officer in Battle Against OpenAI

Mike Krieger, a co-founder of Instagram alongside Kevin Systrom, is joining AI startup Anthropic, known for its Claude 3 family of large language models (LLMs).

In a LinkedIn post, Krieger expressed his enthusiasm about the potential of Claude to foster innovation. “As a two-time entrepreneur, I’m excited by how Claude, combined with the right features, can help people innovate more quickly and cost-effectively,” he stated.

Anthropic emphasized Krieger's extensive experience, particularly his role in scaling Instagram to over a billion users and growing the engineering team to 450 professionals. “With his deep expertise in product development—from coding to leadership—Mike is uniquely positioned to elevate Anthropic as we continue our rapid growth,” the company noted in a blog post.

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, praised Krieger, stating, “Mike is a world-class engineer and builder. His expertise in developing user-friendly products will be vital as we enhance interactions with Claude, especially in the workplace. We’re fortunate to welcome his vision and leadership to our team.”

Krieger's recent venture was Artifact, an AI-driven news app co-founded with Systrom, which was sold to Yahoo in April. The app will be integrated into Yahoo News and other services.

Having left Instagram in October 2018, six years after its acquisition by Facebook (now Meta Platforms, Inc.) for $1 billion, Krieger’s new role arrives at a pivotal moment in the competitive AI landscape.

Anthropic recently made waves with the release of its Claude 3 LLMs, including Claude Opus, which briefly held the title of most powerful general-purpose LLM. However, rivals like OpenAI—where Amodei and co-founder Daniela Amodei previously worked—quickly responded, unveiling updates to GPT-4 Turbo and launching GPT-4o, both outperforming Claude 3 in many benchmarks.

As competition escalates with players like OpenAI and Google vying for market share, initial responses from Anthropic's staff appear optimistic. Developer relations team member Alex Albert remarked on X, “The vibe at Anthropic right now is like the training montage scene in Rocky 2.”

This sentiment reflects hopes within the team that, like Rocky Balboa, they can overcome challenges and emerge victorious in the evolving AI landscape.