Artifact, an AI-powered news aggregation app is here to stay, at least for a while. Developed by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the creators had announced earlier this year that they were closing shop because “the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.”
In a blog post, the developers had said that they would be slowly winding down operations in February, but the app seems to be working to date. According to a recent report by TechCrunch, Systrom said he was working with Krieger and that they haven’t given up on the plan to maintain the app in the future and will try to keep the service alive.
The report also suggests that Systrom and Kriger are currently the only people running Artifact and it will likely shut down sometime later. Unlike other apps, Artifact had been funded by the founders themselves, and it looks like they still have the money to continue running the app, at least for now.
Launched in February last year, Artifact delivers AI-powered personalised news curations based on user behaviour. The app eventually rolled out several new features like AI-powered article summaries, comments, a Twitter-like posting feature and marking articles as clickbait. However, the app has lost some of these since they required extensive moderation, which was more than what the eight-person team at Artifact could handle.
The article originally appeared on Indian Express.
