Instagram Co-Founders Launch New Social Media News App Artifact

Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have officially launched Artifact, a personalized news feed driven by artificial intelligence.

The app — now available on Google Play and the Apple App Store — is open to the public, with no waitlist or phone number required.

Upon opening the app, new users will have to choose at least ten topics among different categories, such as lifestyle, health, tech and science, sports, and global news, among others.

"With the new version of our app, we're also introducing new tools to help you personalize your experience, visualize your reading history, and see what's popular in your network," the company wrote in an announcement. "Our hope is to provide control over what you see in Feed and a new lens into what you and your network are finding most interesting."

Systrom and Krieger previously launched their latest venture as an invite-only experience, requiring a phone number and an invite to try the app. The company said that the waitlist included around 160,000 sign-ups.

According to TechCrunch, the delay in the public launch of the app was because of data requirements for the app's underlying technology. The app reportedly uses algorithms and machine learning technology to create a curated set of news articles for each user based on how they engage with the app's content.

"The machine learning that a lot of what we're doing is based on was invented in 2017 at Google. It's called the transformer," Systrom said, as quoted by TechCrunch. "Without that, GPT-3, 3.5, etc. wouldn't exist. Without that, you wouldn't have DALL-E. Without that, you wouldn't have ChatGPT."

"So what we're starting to see, I think, this rise in applications of this core technology, the transformer."

New features of the app include seeing what's popular in the users' networks and visualizing reading history after ten articles.

"It doesn't tell you who read it. It doesn't tell you how many of them read it, so it keeps privacy — and we clearly don't do it with just 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," Systrom noted, per TechCrunch.

The co-founder compared the timing of their launch to the founding of Instagram, saying that the latter stood out among other image-sharing apps because of its timing.

"When we built Instagram, the iPhone 4 had just launched, and we were so excited about the processing speed and also about the camera being just good enough. There was this breaking point… We happened to stand out from the crowd because we had a couple of differentiating features, and we timed it correctly," Systrom said, per TechCrunch. "We are certainly betting on that thesis [with Artifact] — which is that the technology is different."

Since leaving the news feed to AI is quite risky amid the rise of misinformation and extremist content, Systrom clarified that their goal for Artifact is to feature different publishers across the spectrum.

"Our goal is to have publishers across the ideological spectrum subject to quality and integrity," Systrom told Gizmodo. "The only content that's allowed to be distributed is subject to a high-quality bar."