Instagram co-founders to shut down their Artifact news app

Artifact, the artificial intelligence (AI) powered news app created by Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger is shutting down. This was announced in a blogpost. Artifact was launched last February as a personalised news reading app.  

Artifact will however continue to operate the core news reading capability through the end of February. On its website, the makers of the app announced their decision to wind up the operations of the app.   

In a blog post announcing the shutdown, Systrom explained that while Artifact had developed a loyal user base who loved the app, the overall market opportunity was not large enough to justify continued investment.

“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,” Systrom wrote. 

Following its launch last year, Artifact added several new features including AI-powered article summaries, the ability to comment on and mark articles as clickbait, and a Twitter-like posting feature. However, these latter features required extensive moderation that Artifact’s small 8-person team could not sufficiently support. 

Artifact will begin winding down features over the next few weeks, starting with disabling the ability to make new posts and comments. Existing posts will remain visible temporarily as the team works to reduce moderation needs. The app’s core news aggregation capability will continue operating through the end of February to give users time to find alternative services.