Artifact, the well-received AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is probably not shutting down as planned. The corporate announced in January the award-winning app can be winding down operations because the market opportunity wasn’t “large enough to warrant continued investment.” Nonetheless, despite an end-of-life date of February 2024, the app has continued to operate in the numerous weeks since.
Because it seems, that’s not by mistake.
Systrom tells us that he and Krieger are continuing to maintain Artifact alive in the interim and haven’t yet given up on a plan to take care of the app in the long run — news that may likely give fans of the news discovery app a little bit of hope.
“It takes rather a lot less to run it than we had imagined,” Systrom confirmed to TechCrunch, adding that it’s just himself and Krieger running Artifact right away. “It would 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 at launch, not only since it was the primary major effort at a recent social app from Instagram’s co-founders, but in addition due to its clever use of AI. The personalized news reading app leveraged AI to assist users discover the news they were most excited about from a wide range of pre-vetted sources, and offered up features to summarize news in various styles (like “Gen Z” or “Explain Like I’m Five”). It could also rewrite clickbait headlines for higher clarity, amongst other things.
Following Artifact’s announcement of its impending closure, interest in using AI to summarize the news has heated up.
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, like RSS reader Feeeed, AI-powered news reader Bulletin and Particle, an AI news reader built by former Twitter engineers, including the senior director of Product Management at Twitter, Sara Beykpour, and former senior engineer at each Twitter and Tesla, Marcel Molina. The latter recently raised $4.4 million in seed funding, indicating investor interest on this space is growing, too.
Artifact, meanwhile, had been self-funded by the founders to the tune of “single-digit thousands and thousands,” and it seems they’ve the funds to proceed to run the app — at the least within the near term.
Unfortunately for Artifact’s early adopters, the app has been stripped of its social features, like commenting and posting, but it surely continues to supply news reading and AI summarization features within the version that is still live today.