More than four years after leaving Instagram, the co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, return to the market to announce the launch of a new application: Artifact.
The idea of the app is to create a personalized feed that contains articles selected from editorials ranging from major newspapers, such as The New York Times, to texts by small creators from the most diverse niches, with the aim of becoming a kind of “TikTok for text”.
What is Artifact?
Artifact uses artificial intelligence to understand users’ interests and generate a personalized news feed (the more you use the app, the more the algorithm becomes personalized), where it will also be possible – soon – to follow other users and interact with them through comments and direct messages, encouraging discussions among your friends.
It is important to highlight that Artifact will be curated from approved sources, guaranteeing high quality news and information. The company reviews through a fact-checking process before approving them. However, the algorithm may also provide content that the user may not agree with.
The app is available now for Android and iOS, and people interested in trying Artifact need an invite, but currently can sign up for one via the waiting list, according to a tweet made by Systrom on his personal account on the birdie network.
Eventually, the platform will be able to display personalized advertising for users who access a free plan, but paid options, such as premium subscriptions, are being explored by the app’s team.
Inspiration? New competitor?
The idea of the application is not new to the digital market, since Byte Dance – the company that owns TikTok – has an app with the same logic, Toutiao, China’s largest news aggregator with currently over 200 million users and valued at US$75 billion.
Artifact is also being considered as a possible competitor (or a direct attack) to Twitter, recently acquired by Elon Musk.
Regardless, it is clear that the app was inspired by and captured the best technologies of each platform that is currently successful. An example of this is algorithmic feed prediction, popularized by TikTok and now used by Artifact for text feeds.
Furthermore, Systrom recounts to Platformer that they were also inspired by advances in AI,like the Transformer from Google, which helps computers better understand languages and contexts. (ChatGPT is an example of an app built on the Transformer architecture.)
AI is no longer the future, it’s reality, and with the launch of ChatGPT last year, the interest and curiosity around this technology grew immensely among companies and professionals in the tech and marketing industries.
Therefore, it will be necessary for professionals to have an open mind to understand the context in which Artifact will be installed in the market, since being created by two technology giants, it is possible that it will become another application/resource for us to have a hand in creating online communities and searching for first-hand content.
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