- By Vikas Yadav
- Sat, 13 Jan 2024 03:06 PM (IST)
- Source:JND
Artifact, the news application developed by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, will mark a full stop on its service barely after a year of coming into existence. The Instagram co-founders had an AI-centric approach to recommending news content to its users. However, it seems the app failed to make a mark to survive its operations. According to a post by Systrom, the company has decided to "wind down operations" of the app.
According to the post, the app was named the "everyday essential app" by Google Play Store recently. Artifact was the work of a team of eight people who came from backgrounds ranging from engineers to designers. The company also tweaked some options within the app to allow users some time to adjust.
"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 post noted. From today onwards, users will no longer be able to add new posts and comments to the app. The reason cited for this was that: "This type of content requires a fair amount of moderation and oversight and we will not have the staff going forward to support these features."
Artifact Shutting Down: The news reading capability on the app will last until February. (Image:Artifact)
The existing posts will be visible to the user within the profile self-view. The news reading capability will be available until February. Launched last year in January, Artifact offered AI-made news summaries, the option to comment on articles, mark them as clickbait, rewrite them and more.
With the option to post content, the company also ended up taking on Twitter, the space already puffed with competition from Meta Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky and more. "My hope is that technology can find ways to preserve, support and grow [news] institutions and that these institutions find ways of leveraging the scale that things like AI can provide," the CEO noted.