Co-Founders of Instagram Decide to Shut Down Artifact News App

News application Artifact, created by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, has shut down just one year after its launch. The app used an AI-driven approach to curate news articles that users might be interested in reading, but it seems it did not attract enough users to sustain the development of the app.

CEO Kevin Systrom said in a blog post, "We built something that a core group of users really liked, but our conclusion is that the market opportunity isn't large enough to justify continuing to invest in this way." The app will stop functioning starting today. Users will no longer be able to add new comments or posts, although Artifact will still allow you to "read news until the end of February."

Since its launch at the end of January 2023, Artifact added several new interesting features, such as AI-driven article summaries, the ability to comment on articles within Artifact, and the ability to mark articles as clickbait (and then have them rewritten using AI). It expanded from solely focusing on news to allowing people to share cool things on the web through links and Twitter-like posts. However, Systrom stated that features like comments and posts required "considerable moderation and supervision," which the app did not have the staff to support.

Systrom said the eight-person team working on Artifact will "go their separate ways." He added that he is "personally excited to continue building new things" and that the opportunities for new ideas in the field of artificial intelligence "seem limitless."