Anthropic's Krieger: AI agents and people will learn to work together
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Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger interviewed by Ina Fried on stage at Axios' AI+ Summit. Photo: Chris Constantine/Axios
AI agents are still at least a year away from being able to work autonomously, Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger told Axios' Ina Fried at the Axios AI+ Summit Tuesday.
The big picture: Krieger compared users' adoption of AI agents as they evolve to the process of drivers adapting to Tesla's self-driving mode.
- When drivers start using self-driving capabilities, they're instructed to keep both hands on the wheel, but, he said, "eventually it's more like, as long as you're checking in every once in a while, I'm comfortable with it."
Catch up quick: Krieger co-founded Instagram and sold it to Facebook in 2012, then left Facebook in 2018 and later started Artifact, an AI news app. Artifact shut down in January, and Krieger joined Anthropic as its chief product officer in May.
- Krieger told Axios that he first felt the tug of working on generative AI while beginning to use it at Artifact. "Things that would've taken me months to build were done in an afternoon," he said.
Between the lines: Krieger said one of the biggest problems with current AI chatbots is how tough it is for users to learn to write prompts. "The future is here, it's just that not everybody knows how to use it yet.... is chatting with a model even the right UI? can we do something better?"
- In the future, he hopes, average users won't have to learn to become skilled prompt engineers; instead, the models will get better at understanding what users want.
- Ideally, Krieger says, users could hand Anthropic's Claude AI a to-do list that it could complete without help.
Case in point: This year, the Instagram founder said he used Claude to help write the text in his family's holiday card — and to read a list of addresses off a poorly formatted PDF so he could print address labels.
- Next year, Krieger says, he'd like to see Claude take over the entire holiday card process — or at least "get me mostly there."
Yes, but: One sticking point is that users will want AI agents to check in when they don't know what to do next. But users don't want them to check in too frequently.
- The agents should ask permission to complete a task when they deem it could be problematic — and explain why they're doing so, Krieger said.
