After less than a year of operation, there appears to be no way for AI news aggregator Artifact to turn a profit, with the service set to shut down permanently at the end of February.
iPhone artifact interface
Artifact was launched in late February 2023 by Instagram co-founders Mike Kreiger and Kevin Systrom. The service had an interesting feature that not only presented news to readers, but also curated feeds based on likes.
Curation is basic enough, but the service also offered Ai summaries of articles. Additionally, Artifact recently began allowing users to rewrite articles posted to the service with Ai capabilities.
“While we built something that our core user group loved, we concluded that the market opportunity was not large enough to justify continued investment like this,” said Kevin Systrom, CEO of Artifact. I wrote this on Medium on Friday night. “It's easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often the sooner you make difficult decisions, the better for everyone involved.”
Ahead of the complete shutdown, the company is cutting back on apps. Going forward, the ability to add new comments and posts will be removed, reducing moderation efforts required in the short term.
Existing posts will remain visible to authors in their profile selfview. Viewing of Core News will continue until the end of February 2024.
News of the closure was shared by Artifact CEO Kevin Systrom on Friday night.
