Artifact, the well-received AI-powered news app created by Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, may not be shutting down as planned. The company announced in January that the award-winning app would be winding down operations as the market opportunity wasn’t “big enough to warrant continued investment.” However, despite an end-of-life date of February 2024, the app has continued to function in the many weeks since.
As it turns out, that’s not by mistake.
Systrom reveals that he and Krieger are keeping Artifact alive for the time being and have not yet given up on a plan to maintain the app in the future – this news may give fans of the news discovery app a glimmer of hope.
“It takes a lot less to run Artifact than we had imagined,” Systrom confirms to TechCrunch, adding that it’s just himself and Krieger running Artifact currently. “It will still likely go away, but we’re exploring all possible routes for it going forward.” (Perhaps an exit deal is at hand?)
Artifact made a splash upon its launch, not only because it was the first major effort at a new social app from Instagram’s co-founders, but also because of its clever use of AI. The personalized news reading app leveraged AI to help users discover the news they were most interested in from a variety of pre-vetted sources and offered features to summarize news in different styles (such as “Gen Z” or “Explain Like I’m Five”). It could even rewrite clickbait headlines for better clarity, among other things.
Artifact‘s “Gen Z summary” feature is so out of pocket. I’ll miss it when the app goes down. @samhenrigold@hachyderm.io (@samhenrigold) March 16, 2024
Following Artifact‘s announcement of its impending closure, interest in using AI to summarize the news has only increased.
Browser startup Arc implemented an AI-powered “pinch to summarize” feature ahead of its $50 million fundraise. Other startups have also turned to AI to enhance the news reading experience, such as RSS reader Feeeed, AI-powered news reader Bulletin, and Particle, an AI news reader created by former Twitter engineers, including Sara Beykpour (Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter) and Marcel Molina (former senior engineer at both Twitter and Tesla). The latter recently raised $4.4 million in seed funding, further indicating the growing interest in this field from investors.
Meanwhile, Artifact had been self-funded by the founders with “single-digit millions,” and it appears they have the resources to keep the app running – at least for the time being.
Unfortunately for early adopters of Artifact, the app has been stripped of its social features, such as commenting and posting. However, it still offers news reading and AI summarization capabilities in the version that is currently live.
