Anthropic taps Instagram co-founder as product chief

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has appointed Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger as its chief product officer, the company said on Wednesday, it looks to spruce up its AI offerings and get ahead of rivals.

Krieger will oversee the company's product engineering, management and design efforts and help bring Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude to a wider audience, the company said.

The OpenAI competitor has attracted billions of dollars in investment from its backers, Amazon.com AMZN and Alphabet GOOG, as Big Tech firms look to catch up with Microsoft-backed ChatGPT maker.

Anthropic unveiled a suite of AI models known as Claude 3 in March and said it outperforms rival models like GPT-4 from OpenAI and Gemini 1.0 Ultra from Google on various benchmark exams.

"Mike's background in developing intuitive products and user experiences will be invaluable as we create new ways for people to interact with Claude, particularly in the workplace," Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei said in a statement.

Earlier this month, the company introduced a business version of Claude 3, priced at priced at $30 per user per month, as it looks to grab corporate dollars.

Krieger, on the other hand, sold his AI-driven news platform, Artifact, to Yahoo last month as the company did not see enough market opportunity to warrant continued investment.

Krieger resigned as chief technical officer of Meta-owned META Instagram in 2018 giving scant explanation for the move.