Artifact, the AI news app created by Instagram's founders, is shutting down

Artifact, a personalized news app curated by AI, is shuttering its windows and shutting off comments, just one year after it launched from the minds of Instagram’s former founders. “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,” wrote co-founder Kevin Systrom in a Medium announcement. “It’s easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved… We live in an exciting time where artificial intelligence is changing just about everything we touch, and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless.” SEE ALSO: In Memoriam: The tech that died in 2023 The app was created by Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram co-founders who left in 2018 to pursue to new ventures, including addressing what Sytrom called the “existential crises” facing the news industry and the habits of overwhelmed users. “News and information remain critical areas for startup investment,” Systrom wrote. “We are at an existential moment where many publications are shutting down or struggling, local news has all but vanished, and larger publishers have fraught relationships with leading technology companies. My hope is that technology can find ways to preserve, support and grow these institutions…”Artifact launched in Jan. 2023, and was initially pegged as a purely consumable feed of “news, fact, and AI” intended to utilize machine learning to curate relevant news and posts from journalists, like a news-forward TikTok For…Artifact, the AI news app created by Instagram's founders, is shutting down