Artifact, the widely accepted AI news app from Instagram 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 cease operations as the market opportunity was not “large enough to justify continued investment.” However, despite its February 2024 end-of-life date, the app has continued to run in the many weeks since.
As it turns out, this is no accident.
Systrom tells us that he and Krieger are continuing to keep Artifact alive for now and haven’t yet given up on a plan to keep the app going into the future — news that will likely give fans of the news discovery app some hope.
“It takes a lot less to run than we imagined,” Systrom confirmed to TechCrunch, adding that only he and Krieger are currently running Artifact. “It will still be possible for it to go away, but we are exploring all possible routes to move forward with it.”
Artifact made a splash at launch, not only because it was the first major attempt at a new social app from the co-founders of Instagram, but also because of its clever use of AI. The personalized news reader app leveraged artificial intelligence to help users discover the news they’re most interested in from a variety of pre-selected sources, and offered features to summarize news in different styles (such as “Gen Z” or “Explain Like I’m “Five”).It could also rewrite clickbait headlines for better clarity, among other things.
Following the Artifact’s announcement following its impending closure, interest in using artificial intelligence to summarize news has grown.
Browser startup Arc implemented an AI-powered “pinch-to-summary” feature before raising $50 million in funding. Other startups have also turned to AI to improve the news reading experience, such as RSS reader Feeeed, an AI-powered news reader, and Particle, an AI news reader built by ex-Twitter engineers, including Senior Director of Product Management on Twitter. Sara Beykpourand former senior engineer at both Twitter and Tesla, Marcel Molina. The latter recently raised $4.4 million in seed funding, indicating that investor interest in this space is also growing.
Artifact, meanwhile, had self-funded the founders to the tune of “single digit millions” and it looks like they have the funds to keep the app running — at least in the short term.
Unfortunately for early users of Artificat, the app has been stripped of its social features such as commenting and posting, but continues to offer newsreading and AI summary features in the version that remains live today.
