YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Krieger

lines on the record: 107
first: 2024-09-09
most recent: 2024-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Or the other metaphor I've been using is like, you know, 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. I'd love for us instead to find ways of using Claude to make us more effective at everything we do on product so that we don't have to double. Because, you know, 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. 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 event. And I was like, how do you think about developer efficiency and like team growth? And he's like, well, if every single person I hire is at least like net contributing something that succeeding, even if it's like sub number like a one to one ratio or before, like.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is really, I think, probably, I wouldn't say doubled but almost doubled, product is just north of 100. So the rest is 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. Like we're really big on research. And like product is this very small claw still.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's decide on the actual models, and that's everything from researching model architecture. 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.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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? How are startups that are using it for code giving us feedback on us 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. But I'd say like within product, you know, and I guess a click down because I know you get really interested in undecoder on like 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.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. I would say if you just sliced off the product team, it would look similar to product teams that 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. I think that can go into why I think that's a good idea. That's a 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 in terms of multimodal or what type of text they understand even understanding what languages they need to be good at.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like Think this brings me to the decoder questions Anthropic is a what's called a public benefit corporation. You've got a there's a trust underlying it. You are the first head of product. You've described the product and research teams as being different. Then there's a safety culture. How does that all work? How is anthropic structured?”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think you would hear that. You definitely would not hear that at Instagram, not because we were bad people, but that was just like not in the succeeded in helping people see the world in more beautiful visual way. But the company failed, I would be super bummed. And like, I think a lot of people here would be very bummed too. But that ethos is quite unique.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The bridge is unfortunately associated with suicides. 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 trivial example because it's like an Easter egg we shipped for basically two days and then wound down. But it was like very much at its core there. 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're 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. And it's what I appreciate about what the product and the research teams here is that it's not seen as, oh, man, it's like 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. Like at our second all-hand since I was here, 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 an outcome, as a good outcome. And like.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, should we build and release Golden Gate Clod? It's almost like an offhand comment. And a few of us were like absolutely yes. Like I think it's like letting people for two reasons. One, this is actually quite fun. But two, like getting people actually have some firsthand contact with what a model that has had some of its parameters tuned was valuable. So from that IRC message to having Golden Gate 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 like 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. There's like 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 wells? Like, no, absolutely. Like, 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.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, deeply. And I saw it in week two. So I'm like, I'm a ship-oriented person, you know, like even with Instagram like early days. It was like, let's not get bogged down in like building the 50 features. Let's build the two things well and get it out as soon as possible. And some of those decisions to ship a week earlier and, you know, not have every feature, I think were actually existential to the company. So like I feel that in my bones. So 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. Not just like kind of believe it like prompted like, hey, you're the Golden Gate Bridge. Deeply, like in the way that my five-year-old will make everything about turtles, like it made everything about the Golden Gate Bridge. Like, how are you today? Like, I'm feeling great. I'm feeling international orange. And like I'm feeling in the foggy, you know, clouds of San Francisco. And somebody in our Slack was like,”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually just Is that expressed in the company? I mean, obviously, Instagram had big moderation policies. You thought about it a lot. It is not perfect as a platform or a company, but it is certainly at the core of the platform. Is that at the core of Anthropic in the same way that there are things you will not do?”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Matt Levine has a great, like it's a universal sorting function where it's actually just going to distill it on either side.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anthropic started, it was probably the original We're all quitting OpenAI to be able to safer AI company. Now there's a lot of them. My friend Casey makes a joke that every week someone quits to start a yet another safer AI company.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tied to that sort of like the fact that three or four years ago this technology was radically different. Three or four years ago, like TikTok existed and it was already, 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 an interesting baby with Vine, like it might have created TikTok. So I think it is partially because the platform is so entertaining. I think that's a piece. I think the connection to real people is an interesting one. And I'd love to spend more time on that one because I think that's an interesting kind of piece of the AI ecosystem. And then the last piece is just the knowability of where it goes or like probably the three that it grounds it more.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right, exactly like full on TikTok. Right. Like 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 AI use case, it's a bit more like, well, where does this accelerate 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”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I think to ground in the TikTok example as well, I think there's also an aspect where, you know, if you imagine the future of TikTok, probably most people say, well, like, well, maybe the loud more futures and I'll use it even more. I don't even know what the average time spent. That's fair. That's the end of the economy.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dynamic between this platform is going to be loaded full of other people's work and we're going to get value of it. That seems to be rooted in the fact that mostly I'm looking at the actual work. I'm not looking at some 15th derivative of this whole house as expressed by an A. Do you think that AI chatbots can ever get to a place where it feels like that, where I'm actually just looking at the work or I'm providing my attention or time or money to the actual person who made the underlying work as opposed to we trained it on the open internet and now we're charging you 20 bucks and 15 steps back that person gets nothing.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They need to Let me ground that question in a more specific example, both in order to ask you a more specific question and also to calm the people who are already drafting me angry emails. TikTok exists. TikTok is maybe the purest garden of innovative copyright infringement that the world has ever created. Like I've watched entire movies on TikTok, and it's just because people have found ways to bypass their content filters. I do not perceive the same outrage at TikTok for copyright infringement as I do with AI. Maybe there's someone's really mad. I watched entire like 1980s episodes of this whole house on TikTok accounts that are literally labeled like best of old this old house. I don't think Bob Vula is getting royalties for that. But it seems to be fine because TikTok as a whole has so much utility and people perceive even the utility of watching like old 19 episodes of this whole house. And there's something about that.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jury's still out on that. My wife was doing a kind of a prototype version of that. I've talked to other folks. Our bottles are quite good, but they're like not great at keeping track of characters over book length sort of pieces or reproducing particular things. So yeah, I would ground that in like, what can we be good at now? And 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?”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 little chill out a little bit before sending a slack. But like I think again, grounding it in use case, 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 in anything box, then like everything is potentially either under threat or like adjacent or problematic. I think there's real value to saying, all right, like what are the things we want to be known to be good for? And like I'd argue today that the product actually does serve some of those like well enough that it's like I'm happy it exists and I think folks are in general. And then I think over time, if you look at things like writing assistants more broadly for like novel length writing, I think that”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's very use case dependent and 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 general 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. And I think grouting yourself in that maybe helps you get to that answer, which is like if what you are trying to build, for example, like I use Claude all the time for 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 underway and like also like work on a bunch of different things and to the extent that I have any time to be in like pure build mode, I want to be really efficient on it. 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 so I can just somebody right before this call as well like they are now using”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about that general dynamic, there's a lot of creatives out there who perceive the AI to be a risk for their jobs or perceive that there's been a big taking. I'll just ask about the lawsuit. There's a lawsuit against Anthropic. It's a bunch of authors who say that the model, that Claude is legally trained against their books. Do you think there's a product answer to this? It's going to lead into my second question, but I'll just ask broadly, do you think you can make a product so good that people overcome these objections? Because that is kind of the vague argument I hear from the industry, right? Like right now we're seeing a bunch of chatbots and you can make the chat bot fire off a bunch of copyright information, but there's going to come a turn when that goes away because the product will be so good and so useful that people will think it has been worth it. And I don't see that yet. I think that's a lot of the heart of the copyright lawsuits beyond just the legal pieces of it is that the tools are not so useful that anyone”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, that's, you know, that's when I think about the players in this space. There are times where I'm like, oh, it must be nice to be inside Med. I don't actually know if they train on Instagram conduct or if they talk about that. But there's a lot of good stuff in there. And same with you too. I mean, that's like a close friend of mine's at YouTube. That's like the repository of collective knowledge of how to fix any dishwasher in the world. And like, you know, people ask that kind of stuff. So we'll see over time what those end up looking like.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where you're not also trying to produce Hollywood type videos or 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. So that was a strong sort of contributor to me wanting to be here versus other spots.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 baron, maybe on tour, and we'll have like one hour deep conversation over papoosa's over like what is AI and music and how do these things connect and where do these things go? And I think he always has 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 out and see how that's going to change. I think that question is a big part about why I ended up anthropic if I was going to be in AI. I think a couple of things like obviously the written word is really important and like there's so much that happens in text. I definitely do not mean 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 something that is like tailored to you rather than reproducing something that's already out there. I think reduces some of that space significantly.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hope not, it's the ringboat that comes in later. 2024 with our audience as young as it is, that might be a deep cut, but I encourage everybody to go search for Pete Best and not much of an argument that is. Let me ask you just two big picture questions. Are working in AI generally? You started Instagram, you're deep with creatives, you built a platform. How are you thinking about that”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I wanted to feel like as close ish to a co founder kind of situation as I could. And I think Daniella is the present here. Maybe was trying to sell me, but she's like, you feel like the eighth co-founder that we never had that looks 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.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like employee nickname, but it's fine. 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 the team I would have wanted to have built had I been starting a company enough to do like so much to do that I'm like I wake up every day both excited and daunted by how much there is to do and like 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 like headwinds somewhat outside of our control and that was the the sort of combination so the first one was like big decision like what do I do next and then the second one was like all right is anthropic the right place for it it was the sort of thing where every single conversation I'd had with them I'd go back to the earth and be like I think this could be it like I wasn't thinking about joining a company that's like already running like crazy but like I want to be close to the like core ai tech I want to be working interesting problems I want to be building”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the same time, I was like, I do not want to start another company right now. Like, just went through the ringer on that three years, did an okay outcome. It wasn't the outcome we wanted. And I sat there going, like, I want to work on interesting problems at scale at a company that I started, but I don't want to start a company. It was like, 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, 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 for a long time. His name is Joel. I started talking to them and I realized they, you know, the 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 years, they were like already sort of company values and way things are working. And they called themselves ants. Maybe I would have advocated for a different.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The top level of a decision was what to do next at all. I admit to having a bit of 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 like, what are the aspects of that that I like? 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.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back with Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Kri So that's that chapter. The next chapter is you show up as the chief product officer at Anthropic. What was that conversation like? Because in terms of big commitments, hairy problems, are we going to destroy the web? It's all right there. Maybe it's a lot more work. How'd you make the decision to go to Anthropic?”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Decepti is still huge. I think under new leadership and with a lot of excitement there. And 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, but the fact that I feel like that chapter closed in a nice way and then we could 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.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It sounds like the dream. You just have this. I'm going to walk away. It's a bunch of money. Okay Sense. I was just wondering if that was it or whether it was like it wasn't as much money, but they had the biggest platform and you wanted to because Yahoo is deceptively still huge.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was this optimization function, and I would say the three variables were like deal was attractive enough, our personal commitments post transition were pretty light, which I liked, and they had reached like Yahoo News like 100 million monthly still. So it was like reach minimal commitment, but enough that we felt like it could be successful. And then like they were like in the right space, at least on the bid size.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bit into it with the open mouth. It's a kind of a gross metaphor. But they went it 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 like find little details. I'm like, oh, they kept, I spent a lot of time with this 3D spinning animation when you got to a new reading level. It's like way too much time when this beautiful reflection, specular highlighting thing. I probably misprioritize that week. But they kept it, but now it goes yahoo when you do it. And I was like, that's pretty, pretty on brand. It was a really fascinating experience. But, you know, it gets to live on. 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, like, what would it mean to actually try to create a personalized news system that was not, that was really decoupled from any kind of existing follow graph or what you were seeing already on something like Facebook?”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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. And then the tech team's actually like”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there were a few things that we wanted to align. 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 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 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 pretty unaware of what they were doing beyond like, I was still using Yahoo Finance and my fantasy football league. But beyond that, I was like, not familiar with what they were doing. 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 in 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. And they actually basically pulled it off. I think it was 10 weeks instead of eight weeks.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's economic reasons why that's nice, and some people make their living writing articles about local news stories on Totio, including one of our engineers, I think his 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. Actually, at code, I met an entrepreneur who was creating sort of new media experience that was like 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 like the native distribution type. So recommendation systems for everything and then a like primarily a recommendation based first party content writing platforms are like the two ideas are like one day for somebody.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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, like even within news, is really thinking about how do you eventually open this up? 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 feel like every platform eventually wants to get to this as well. When you watch the sort of closest analogs in China, like Totiao, they started very much like crawl the web, have these eventual publisher deals. And now it is, I would guess, 80 to 90 percent first party content.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 can believe I had the belief that maybe somebody will build out that if you understand yourself well through, or this isn't going to 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 like shopping? Is it around local discovery? Is it around people discovery, all these different places? Because for all the promise, and I'll separate maybe machine learning and AI and I realize that's a shifting kind of definition throughout the years, let's call like for the purposes of our conversation, like 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. So the big company idea was, can we bring Instagram type product thinking to recommender systems?”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's one I want to come back to that theme. I really wanted to start with Artifact in that way because it feels like you had an experience in one version of the internet that is maybe under pressure. The other thing I wanted to ask about artifact, you and Kevin, your co-founder, both once told me that you had like big ideas, like scale ideas for artifact. And you had this big idea, and you wouldn't tell me what it was. It's over now. What was it?”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a really interesting assessment. It's actually funny watching the Yahoo version of it because they've done the content deals to get the more slimmed down pages. 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. give you warrants and all and link directly to you but i think your assessment feels right”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way that we talk about that thesis on decoder most often is that people build media products for the distribution. And so podcasts famously have open distribution. It's just an RSS feed. Well, it's like an RSS feed, but there's like Spotify's ad server in the middle. I'm sorry to everybody who gets whatever ads that we've put in here. But it's still like, it is core. It's an RSS product. Newsletter is still at its core, an iMap product, right? An open mail protocol product. The web is like search distribution. So we've optimized to one thing. And the reason I'm asking this, and I'm going to come back to this theme a few times is it felt like Artifact was trying to build a new kind of distribution, but the product it was trying to distribute was web pages, which were already overtly optimized for something else.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Findability or optimize for what's going to get shared a bunch or what's going to get the most attention. And like that flow, I mean, newsletters are and podcasts are two ways that have probably most successfully broken through that. I think that's been an interesting direction. 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 and somebody is like receiving that story and like all the roadblocks along the way, I think just make that more and more painful. And it's no surprise then that, hey, I can actually just open my email and like 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 call it not a.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, even setting newsletters is a great example where some of the best stuff that I read is sometimes there's a equivalent substack site that you could go look at in 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. And it was the lining experience is not there. I'd say that the thing I notice on the open web in general and like as a longtime fan of the web, somebody that was somebody who was very online before being online was like a thing that people were back in Brazil, like as a preteen. In a lot of ways, the incentives that have been set up around like, well, 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. 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 intermediator already through be it a search engine and optimized for that.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You said media properties. I mean, you know, some media properties have apps. Some are expressed only as newsletters. But I think what I'm asking about is the web. This is just me doing therapy about the web. What I'm worried about is the web, right? The creators aren't on the web. We're not making websites and artifact was predicated on there being a rich web. Search products in general are sort of predicated on there being a rich and searchable web that will deliver good answers. To some extent, AI products require to be a new web because that's where we're training all our models. Did you see that? That, okay, this promise of the web is kind of under pressure. And if all the new stuff is breaking on a closed platform, you can't search like a TikTok or an X or something else or that you can't index or surfacing old tweets is not really a great user experience. Actually building products on the web might be getting more constrained and not a good idea anymore.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where things are happening and where the conversation is happening, at least for the kind of cultural 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 an 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 funny enough is where Instagram has its heart is also very interest-based, less breaking news, but can you have a product that is just that? I think that was the struggle.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would agree with the assessment movie Different Root Causes. I think what we saw, some sites were able to balance kind of a mix of subscription, you know, 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. I could legitimately like every time we linked to a Verge story from artifact, somebody clicked through it. 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-in up to the newsletter. It's like before you've even consumed any content. I think that's 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. It's an expost that went viral.”
2024-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT