Artifact, launched by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is scheduled to shut down just one year after its January 2023 debut.Founders made it clear that the overall market opportunity was not large enough to justify continued investment
Artifact, an artificial intelligence-powered news aggregation app launched by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, plans to shut down its service just one year after its debut in January 2023. In a blog post announcing the closure, Systrom cited the app's loyal user base, but clarified that the overall market opportunity was not large enough to justify continued investment.
“While we have built something that our core user group loves, we have concluded that the market opportunity is not large enough to justify this continued investment,” Systrom said.
Throughout its short existence, Artifact introduced a variety of features, including AI-powered article summarization, the ability to comment on articles and identify them as clickbait, and Twitter-like posting capabilities.
However, the latter feature required significant tuning, and Artifact's small team of eight people struggled to properly support it.
To facilitate the transition, Artifact will gradually reduce functionality over the next few weeks, starting with disabling the ability to create new posts and comments.
Existing posts will temporarily remain visible while the team works to reduce the need for moderation. The core news aggregation functionality will remain operational until the end of February, giving users time to find alternative services.
Despite the closure, Systrom expressed optimism about the future and said he is personally excited to explore new ideas in the AI field. Challenges facing Artifact, including increased competition in the Twitter-like conversation platform market and slowing growth at news aggregators, are part of the reason it has struggled to find a clear product-market fit. It is thought that it has become.
Artifact tried to differentiate itself with AI-powered features like rewritten article summaries, but its identity never solidified into a coherent product. The app struggled to define itself as a conversation platform, link-sharing service, or AI-powered news engine, and this lack of focus, combined with the demands of content management, posed significant challenges to its scalability. .
(Information provided by agency)
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Published date: January 15, 2024 16:37:32 IST
