Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom has announced that the Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered news app, Artifact, will soon be shut down. Artifact, launched last January, was a personalised news reading app. Systrom in a blog post said, "To our Artifact Users and Partners, We’ve made the decision to wind down operations of the Artifact app. Artifact will continue to operate the core news reading capability through the end of February."
Since the launch of Artifact, it has added a bunch of features like AI-powered article summaries, the ability to comment on articles within the platform, the ability to mark articles as clickbait (and then rewrite them using AI), etc. However, now the team of eight who were running it will go their separate ways.
Systrom in the post said that this decision has been taken in view of the market opportunity not being big enough to warrant continued investment.
The post read, “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. It’s easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved."
It added, "In order to slim down operations, effective on January 12th, we are removing the ability to add new posts and comments. Your existing posts will remain visible to you on your own profile self-view."
Artifact was considered a modern version of Google Reader, an RSS newsreader that the search engine giant had shut down way back in 2013. It is a newsreader that uses machine learning in order to personalise the user experience.
A user jokingly tweeted, "Artifact news app notifying news about its own death."