The founders of Instagram created the social network Artifact, which forms the news feed with the help of AI
Text TikTok
- Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger sold Instagram for $750 million and left Facebook in 2018 due to “relationship difficulties.” Subsequently, the developers created their own startup, which explores ideas for next-generation social applications. Their first product, Artifact, is a social network that uses machine learning to personalize the news feed.
Artifact — a product that symbolizes in its name a combination of articles, facts and artificial intelligence — has already opened a waiting list for users. You can sign up for it here, and the app is available for both Android and iOS.
Systrom-Krieger’s social network is a kind of TikTok for text, although it can also be called the revival of Google Reader as a mobile application, or an unexpected alternative to Twitter.
The application opens a feed of popular text publications selected from a list of publications – starting with The New York Times and ending with small blogs on special topics. Tap on an article you’re interested in and Artifact will show you similar posts and stories in the future, just as watching a video on TikTok’s “For You” page adjusts its algorithm over time.
Artifact beta users are currently testing two more features:
- a feed of articles published by users to whom you are subscribed, as well as their comments on these publications;
- inbox so you can discuss posts you’ve read privately.
In some ways, Artifact may seem like a step backwards, as platforms inspired by the success of TikTok have spent the last few years introducing short-form video products. Meanwhile, like the social network of the late 2000s, Artifact is firmly focused on text; but the founders hope that recent advances in artificial intelligence will help their app break through to a larger audience.
Technically, this isn’t the Systrom-Krieger duo’s first project — in 2020, they teamed up to create the Rt.live website to track the spread of COVID. Systrom said the new company wasn’t slated to start until three things happened: a big new wave in consumer technology; a way to connect this wave with social technologies; an idea of how their product can solve a problem.
The breakthrough that led to Artifact was Transformer, invented by Google in 2017, a neural network architecture for language understanding that uses much less input than previously required. The technology has helped machine learning systems improve at a much faster pace, which directly led to last year’s release of ChatGPT and the corresponding boom in AI interest. (Transformer is the ‘T’ in ChatGPT.)
And it also created some new opportunities for social media. At first, social networks showed us what was considered interesting for our friends — the Facebook model. Then they started showing content based on the people we chose to follow, whether we were friends or not—the Twitter model.
TikTok’s innovation was to show recommendations using only algorithmic predictions, regardless of who we follow. It soon became the most downloaded app in the world.
Artifact will try to do the same, but for text. Currently, Systrom and Krieger are self-funding the app, which is being worked on by a team of seven people — including Robbie Stein, Instagram’s top product manager from 2016 to 2021.
