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Instagram’s co-founders’ personalized news reader, Artifact, is now open to the public without sign-up. Last month, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger unveiled their latest venture as an invite-only experience, promising their news app would later include social features like discussing the news with friends. Today’s launch removes Artifact’s waitlist and phone number requirements, introduces its first social feature, and adds feedback controls to personalize news reading.
Artifact’s January launch required a phone number and an invite, which boosted demand. The app was unavailable to 160,000 potential users on the waitlist, according to the company. Artifact required a U.S. phone number, so even with an invite, non-Americans couldn’t try it.
Today, Artifact is instantly usable. Unless you create an account to port Artifact to a new device, you won’t need to enter a phone number.
Systrom says the delay in launching publicly was not just to generate consumer interest in the Instagram founders’ next big thing, but also because the technology needs a certain amount of data and a certain number of users to provide the best experience. After a few weeks, the company thinks the app is ready for more users.
With today’s launch, Artifact will show users their news reading habits by category, recent articles, and publishers. It will also narrow your reading by topic. Instead of “tech” or “AI,” you may have read a lot about “ChatGPT.”
Artifact wants to give readers tools to click a button to show more or less from a topic to better control, personalize, and diversify their feed. In the meantime, users can block or pause publishers or select and unselect general interest categories in settings.
Today, you can upload your contacts to see which articles are popular in your network. Artifact’s Top Articles feature is more privacy-focused than Twitter’s, which shows you articles your followers like.
The reader is unknown. It keeps privacy by not telling you how many read it, and we don’t do it with one read. “So you can’t have one contact and like figure out what that one contact is reading…it has to meet a certain minimum threshold,” says Systrom.
He says the app isn’t driven by what your friends are reading, but it can use that as a signal to highlight popular items. The long-term goal is to add news article discussion to Artifact’s social experience. The beta’s Discover feed lets testers share articles and like and comment on others’. This way of engaging with news feels like News Feed or Instagram.
The launch of a new news app from Instagram’s founders was surprising, especially given the challenges of launching a news reader in the U.S., where it would have to compete with tech giants like Google News, Apple News, and Meta’s News Feed. Over time, it became a source of news and misinformation for billions of users. Pew Research found that one-third of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook, making news startups difficult.
Artifact seems like a U.S. version of Toutiao or SmartNews, which use algorithms and machine learning to curate news articles for each user based on how they use the app.
Systrom claims that while Artifact and other personalized news readers use machine learning to deliver curated news to users, the “devil is in the details” here.
“Google invented the machine learning we use in 2017. “Transformer,” says Systrom. That’s ChatGPT’s “T.” “Without that, GPT-3, 3.5, etc. wouldn’t exist. That created DALL-E. He says ChatGPT wouldn’t exist without that. “I think we’re seeing this rise in applications of this core technology, the transformer.”
In other words, new technology creates a market for new apps that may look similar but use what’s under the hood differently.
Systrom compares this opportunity to Instagram, which launched with other image-sharing apps.
“When we built Instagram, the iPhone 4 had just launched, and we were excited about the processing speed and camera being just good enough. Breakpoint… Systrom says, “We stood out because we had two differentiating features and we timed it correctly.” “Artifact is betting on that thesis—that the technology is different.”
The machine learning tech, social features built by founders of one of the most popular social apps, and personalization tools to improve the experience with more explicit feedback will set Artifact apart.
Today, Artifact curates news from hand-selected, higher-quality publishers across categories that meet integrity criteria like fact-checking and funding transparency. The company notes that they are not necessarily right or left-leaning sites. Readers are also shown a variety of headlines about a topic to break “filter bubbles” and broaden their perspective.
The app learns what news you like based on clicks, dwell time, read time, and other signals like whether you shared the feed with friends. Artifact will personalize news and deliver your interests and provide a place to discuss them as social feeds emerge. The company’s seven-person team isn’t ready to deal with moderation issues yet.
Artifact’s founders are self-funding “single-digit millions” in San Francisco and remotely. Robby Stein, its head of product and founder, is one of five Instagram veterans. To prove that this is not just another Toutiao, the company plans to add more features this year.
Over the next year, Artifact will deviate from the norm. Systrom believes news and publishing have plenty of room for innovation.
Most English-speaking App Stores and Android offer Artifact.
