Anthropic was started in 2021 by former OpenAI executives and researchers who set out to build a more safety-minded AI company — a real theme among ex-OpenAI employees lately. Anthropic’s main product right now is Claude, the name of both its industry-leading AI model and a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT. Anthropic has billions in funding from some of the biggest names in tech, primarily Amazon. At the same time, Anthropic has an intense safety culture that’s distinct among the big AI firms of today. The company is notable for employing some people who legitimately worry AI might destroy mankind, and I wanted to know all about how that tension plays out in product design. On top of that, Mike has a pretty fascinating résumé: longtime tech fans likely know Mike as the cofounder of Instagram, a company he started with Kevin Systrom before selling it to Facebook — now, Meta — for $1 billion back in 2012. That was an eye-popping amount back then, and the deal turned Mike into founder royalty basically overnight. He left Meta in 2018, and a few years later, he started to dabble in AI — but not quite the type of AI we now talk about all the time on Decoder. Instead, Mike and Kevin launched Artifact, an AI-powered news reader that did some very interesting things with recommendation algorithms and aggregation. Ultimately, it didn’t take off like they hoped. Mike and Kevin shut it down earlier this year and sold the underlying tech to Yahoo.

Full interview : Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger on what AI chatbots of the future will look like.