Artifact, the news app created by Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, has shut down just a year after its launch. The app used an AI-based approach to suggest news users might want to read, but it didn’t seem to attract enough people for the Artifact team to continue building the app.
“We built something that a core group of users loved, but we determined that the market opportunity wasn’t large enough to justify continued investment in this way,” says CEO Kevin Systrom in a blog post. The app started going down today. Users can no longer add new comments or posts, and Artifact will still allow you to read news “until the end of February.”
The eight-person team working on Artifact “will go their separate ways,” Systrom says. He adds that he’s “personally excited to keep building new things,” and says the opportunities for new ideas in AI “seem limitless.”