Artifact, a personalized news reader developed by Instagram co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, has now launched and is open to the public without any sign-up required. The app originally required a phone number and an invitation to try it out, which attracted initial demand but kept it out of reach for many potential users. The company received approximately 160,000 sign-ups while on the waitlist, and users outside the U.S. were unable to try Artifact, as a U.S. phone number was necessary for sign-up. With the removal of the waitlist and phone number requirement, users will now have instant access to Artifact upon its first launch. The app’s first social feature has been introduced, and feedback controls have been added to improve the news reading experience. 

Artifact’s goal is to provide tools to allow readers to personalize and expand their feed. Users can manage their interests by blocking or pausing publishers, or selecting and unselecting general interest categories. In addition, a new feature allows users to upload their contacts to see a signal that a particular article is popular within their network. This feature is different from Twitter‘s Top Articles feature, which shows articles popular with the people you follow, as Artifact’s feature is more privacy-focused. It does not tell you who read it or how many of them read it, so it keeps privacy. 

Systrom stated that the underlying technology requires a certain amount of data and a number of people using it to offer the best experience. The company believes the app is now ready for a larger audience. The newly added stats feature shows users the categories they have read, recent articles they have read within those categories, and the publishers they have been reading the most. Very few news publishing apps follow this approach. The reading is grouped more narrowly by specific topics rather than general categories. The broader goal is to expand the social experience to include a way to discuss news articles within Artifact itself. 

Artifact is a U.S.-based version of China‘s Toutiao or Japan‘s SmartNews. Apps like these utilize algorithms and machine learning to form a curated set of news articles for each user based on how they engage with the app’s content. Systrom claims that while Artifact is similar to these other personalized news readers, the “devil is in the details”. The machine learning used in Artifact is based on the transformer, which was invented in 2017 at Google. It’s interesting to note that the ‘T’ in ChatGPT stands for Transformer as well. 

Systrom compares the emergence of Artifact with the founding of Instagram when there were already other image-sharing apps available. There has to be something that distinguishes new technology from existing technology in order to create a niche in the market. In this case, that would be machine learning and other similar algorithms.

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