Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger will join artificial intelligence firm Anthropic as chief product officer, the company announced Wednesday.

Krieger, the former chief technology officer of Meta-owned Instagram, grew the platform to 1 billion users and increased its engineering team to more than 450 people during his time there, per a release. He and Instagram’s other co-founder, Kevin Systrom, most recently built the personalized news app Artifact and sold it to Yahoo.

Around this time last year, Anthropic had only rolled out the first version of its chatbot without any consumer access or major fanfare. Now, it’s one of the hottest AI startups, with a product that directly competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds. Krieger’s hiring is likely meant to further that competition.

The generative AI startup is the company behind Claude, one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google‘s Gemini, has rocketed in popularity in the past year.

“Mike will oversee Anthropic’s product engineering, product management, and product design efforts as we work to expand our suite of enterprise applications and bring Claude to a wider audience,” Anthropic said in a release.

News of Krieger’s hiring follows Anthropic’s debut of its first enterprise offering and iOS app earlier this month. And in March, Anthropic announced Claude 3, a suite of AI models that it says are its fastest and most powerful yet.

Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, and its backers include Google, Salesforce and Amazon. It’s closed five different funding deals totaling about $7.3 billion in the past year.

Krieger will lead Anthropic’s latest initiatives.

The company’s new plan for businesses, dubbed Team, has been in development over the last few quarters and involved beta-testing with between 30 and 50 customers across various industries, such as technology, financial services, legal services and health care, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told CNBC in an interview earlier this month.

Anthropic’s first iOS app is free for users across all plans and also debuted this month. It provides syncing with web chats and the ability to upload photos and files from a smartphone. There are plans to launch an Android app, too.

The generative AI field has exploded over the past year, with a record $29.1 billion invested across nearly 700 deals in 2023, a more than 260% increase in deal value from a year earlier, according to PitchBook. It’s become the buzziest phrase on corporate earnings calls quarter after quarter.

Academics and ethicists have voiced significant concerns about the technology’s tendency to propagate bias. But even so, it’s quickly made its way into schools, online travel, the medical industry, online advertising and more.

The collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge earlier this year and an I-95 overpass in Philadelphia last June weren’t triggered by structural flaws — a runaway, powerless ocean ship and tanker fire were the culprits. But the disasters were the latest examples of an issue seen across the U.S.: trillions of dollars worth of critical — and vulnerable — bridges, roads, dams, factories, plants and machinery that are rapidly aging and in need of repair.

Significant sums of money are being spent to fix the issues, some coming from President Biden’s Infrastructure Act and other legislation, but the way infrastructure is maintained has largely not changed, mostly done slowly by humans or after a significant issue arises like a leak or collapse.

Gecko Robotics, which ranked No. 42 on the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, is taking on the nationwide challenge with AI and robots, specifically, its wall-climbing bots that perform inspections on infrastructure and not only identify existing issues but also to try to predict what can be done to avoid future problems.

“When you think about the built world, a lot of concrete, a lot of metal that is, especially in the U.S., 60 to 70 years old; we as a country have a D rating for infrastructure and getting that up to a B is a $4 trillion to $6 trillion problem,” Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. “A lot of that is understanding what to fix and then targeting those repairs, and then also ensuring that they don’t continue to make the same mistakes.”

Gecko Robotics’ technology is already being used to monitor “500,000 of the world’s most critical assets,” Loosararian said, which range from oil and gas facilities and pipelines to boilers and tanks at manufacturing facilities.

A focus on military hardware, from subs to aircraft carriers

Gecko robots are increasingly being utilized by the U.S. military. In 2022, the U.S. Air Force awarded Gecko Robotics a contract to help it with the conversion of missile silos. Last year, the U.S. Navy tapped the company to help modernize the manufacturing process of its Columbia-class nuclear submarine program, using Gecko’s robots to conduct inspections of welds.

Gecko Robotics is also working with the Navy to inspect aircraft carriers, which Loosararian demonstrated on CNBC via a demo on the USS Intrepid, a decommissioned aircraft carrier that now serves as a museum in New York City.

He compared the analysis that Gecko Robotics is doing on infrastructure to a CAT scan of a human body, while also creating a digital twin of the scanned object.

Those inspections historically are done by workers, collecting thousands of readings across an aircraft carrier. Gecko Robotics technology can collect upwards of 20 million data points in a tenth of the time, Loosararian said.

“There’s human error, and if you’re hanging off the side of a ship, it’s pretty dangerous too,” he said.

There are also issues related to the timeliness of military hardware construction and readiness of defense assets in an unpredictable world of global threats. For example, Loosararian said China is building ships 232 times faster than the U.S. is, a function of the sheer amount of shipbuilding capacity that China now has in comparison.

“A third of our naval vessels are in drydock right now, and you want them out of drydock or not even in a maintenance cycle,” Loosararian said. “What we’re doing with Lidar and ultrasonic sensors is a health scan, seeing what the damages are and how to fix them, because what we’re trying to do is get these ships from drydock out to the seas patrolling as fast as possible.”

The digital twins being created by Gecko robots also help with the building of future projects, saving not only time but resources and capital.

“It’s not just about how things work day-to-day but also how do you build smarter things,” Loosararian said.” If we can understand what fails in the real world, then we can figure out how to build smarter things in the future.”

Palo Alto Networks is buying cloud security software assets from IBM as part of a broader partnership that will give the cybersecurity company access to more consultants and a bigger customer base.

In a joint press release on Tuesday, the companies said Palo Alto is acquiring IBM’s QRadar cloud software for an undisclosed sum and migrating existing customers to its security platform, Cortex Xsiam. IBM will train over 1,000 of its consulting employees on Palo Alto’s products.

Consolidation has been ramping up in the security software industry as companies gear up for a swarm of attacks spawned by artificial intelligence. In March, Cisco closed its $28 billion acquisition of Splunk, the networking company’s largest deal ever, snapping up the leading provider of security information and event management (SIEM) software.

Earlier on Wednesday, two other companies in the SIEM market, Exabeam and Thoma Bravo’s LogRhythm, announced plans to merge.

Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto’s CEO, told CNBC that his company needs to be better prepared to go up against Splunk.

“Clearly, it’s just a hotbed of activity in the consolidation in cybersecurity,” Arora said.

Palo Alto and IBM have been working more closely together for months, and Arora said he’d been talking with IBM CEO Arvind Krishna about how to advance their partnership. But they both sold SIEM software.

“We used to get stuck there,” Arora said.

In December, IBM said its consulting group would offer Palo Alto’s competing Cortex Xsiam software to customers. IBM will now adopt Cortex Xsiam, as well as Palo Alto’s Prisma Sase 3.0 product bundle. Palo Alto will incorporate IBM’s Watsonx large language models into Cortex Xsiam, in addition to its use of models from Google.

The SIEM category has been around for over 20 years, but Palo Alto just introduced Cortex Xsiam two years ago. It’s rapidly gained adoption, with over $90 million in bookings in the latest quarter, and Arora said the company has been taking market share from “everyone.”

For IBM, a more robust lineup of contemporary security tools for consulting might help the company deliver on its stated goal of revenue growth in the mid-single digits for 2024. In the first quarter, revenue increased 3%, with a 2% bump in the consulting segment.

Palo Alto is growing much faster than IBM. In the January quarter, revenue jumped 19%. The company will report results for the latest quarter on Monday.

Palo Alto more than doubled in value last year and its stock is up 6% in 2024, lifting the company’s market cap past $100 billion. The stock rose more than 1% in extended trading. IBM is up close to 5% this year and is now valued at $154 billion.

The companies said the transaction should close by the end of September, subject to regulatory approval and other conditions.

WATCH: IBM CEO Arvind Krishna on revenue miss, consulting business and HashiCorp acquisition