Artifact, the popular AI-powered news app from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, may not shut down as planned. In January, the company announced that its award-winning app would be winding down because the market opportunity was “not large enough to justify continued investment.” However, the app continued to work for weeks afterwards, despite his February 2024 end of support date.
As it turns out, it wasn't a mistake.
Systrom said he and Krieger are keeping Artifact alive for now and have not yet given up on plans to maintain the app in the future. This news may offer some hope to fans of news discovery apps.
“It's taking much less time to run than we imagined,” Systrom admitted to TechCrunch, adding that he and Krieger are currently the only ones running Artifact. “There's still a chance it could probably go away, but we're exploring all possible routes going forward.” (Perhaps a Withdrawal Agreement is on the way?)
Artifact made waves when it launched, not only because it was the Instagram co-founder's first major effort in a new social app, but also because of its clever use of AI. This personalized news-reading app leverages AI to help users find the news they're most interested in from a variety of pre-curated sources, with different styles ('Gen Z', 'My We have provided the ability to summarize the news using “Explain it like this''. We may also rewrite clickbait headlines to make them more clear, among other things.
Interest in using AI to summarize news is growing after Artifact announced its impending closure.
Browser startup Arc has implemented an AI-powered “Pinch to Summarize” feature ahead of $50 million in funding. Other startups are also working to improve the news-reading experience, including RSS reader Feeeed, AI-powered news reader Bulletin, and Particle, an AI news reader developed by former Twitter engineers including Sara, Twitter's senior director of product management. is focusing on AI. Beykpour and Marcel Molina, a former senior engineer at Twitter and Tesla. The latter recently raised $4.4 million in seed funding, indicating growing investor interest in the space as well.
Meanwhile, Artifact's founders have raised “several digit millions” of their own funds, and it appears they have the funds to continue operating the app, at least in the short term.
Unfortunately for early adopters of Artificat, the app has removed social features such as commenting and posting, but the current version still offers news viewing and AI summarization features. Masu.