• Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram, have created a new venture called Artifact, a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand user interests and will soon let users discuss articles with friends.
• Artifact is a kind of TikTok for text, Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or a surprise attack on Twitter.
• The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers, and users can follow other users and comment on posts.
• The breakthrough that enabled Artifact was the transformer, which Google invented in 2017 and allowed machine learning systems to understand language using far fewer inputs.
• Artifact is attempting to do the same thing as TikTok, but for text, and is funded by Systrom and Krieger themselves.
• The company plans to include only publishers who adhere to editorial standards of quality, and will remove individual posts that promote falsehoods.
• The team of seven people working on the app includes Robby Stein, a top product executive at Instagram from 2016 to 2021.
Published January 31, 2023
Visit Platformer to read Casey Newton’s original post Instagram’s co-founders are mounting a comeback
