Artifact, the news application brought to life by Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is closing its doors merely a year after its grand debut. Despite its innovative use of AI to recommend news articles tailored to individual user preferences, it appears that Artifact failed to amass a sufficiently large user base, prompting the team to decide that sustaining the app was no longer viable.
CEO Kevin Systrom said in a blog post:
We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.
The app has begun shutting down. Users are no longer able to comment or share new posts but they will still be able to read news until the end of February.
Since its debut in late January 2023, Artifact has continuously introduced a slew of useful features. These include AI-generated article summaries, the capacity to engage in discussions directly within the app, and the capability to label articles as clickbait and have them automatically reworked by AI.
Artifact’s scope expanded beyond news articles, allowing users to share interesting web content and indulge in a Twitter-like posting feature. Regrettably, Kevin Systrom acknowledges that features such as comments and posts necessitated a substantial level of moderation and supervision, resources that the team cannot currently provide.
According to Systrom, the team consisting of eight individuals dedicated to Artifact will be dispersing to pursue their paths. He expresses his enthusiasm for embarking on new ventures and notes that the possibilities for innovative AI-driven ideas appear boundless.