Artifact, the popular AI-powered news app from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger may not shut down as planned. The company earlier announced in January that the award-winning app would start winding down operations because the market opportunity wasn't "big enough to warrant continued investment." However, despite an end-of-life date of February 2024, the app continues to work in many weeks since that announcement.

As it happens, that's not by accident.

Systrom says he and Krieger are going to keep Artifact alive for now, though they have yet to hold out hope for an actual plan to keep the app alive in the future news that will likely give fans of the news discovery app a bit of hope.

It takes a lot less to run it than we had imagined, Systrom confirmed to TechCrunch, while adding that it's just himself and Krieger running Artifact right now. It will still likely go away, but we're exploring all possible routes for it going forward. (Perhaps an exit deal is at hand?)

Artifact caused waves on its release, given that it was the first major effort at a new social application from the co-founders of Instagram and also for its smart use of AI. It was a personalized news-reading app, built with AI, in which it guided users to know the news they would like most of all, based on a range of pre-vetted sources, and there's news summarization in multiple styles, including "Gen Z" or "Explain Like I'm Five." It can also rewrite clickbait headlines for better clarity and do more.

artifact's "gen z summary" feature is so deeply out of pocket. i'll miss it when the app goes down. pic.twitter.com/5PaMavJbNS

After Artifact announced its impending demise, the interest to use AI to summarize the news has really heated up.

Browser startup Arc implemented an AI-powered "pinch to summarize" feature before its $50 million fundraise. Other news-reading startups have also leveraged AI to boost the quality of the experience, including RSS reader Feeeed, AI-powered news reader Bulletin, and Particle - an AI news reader developed by former Twitter engineers, including the company's senior director of Product Management, Sara Beykpour, and former senior engineer at both Twitter and Tesla, Marcel Molina. The latter recently raised $4.4 million in seed funding, suggesting investor interest in this space is increasing too.

Artifact, on the other hand, had been self-funded by the founders to the tune of "single-digit millions," and it appears they have the money to keep the app operating — at least for the near future.

Unfortunately for early adopters, the app has been stripped of its social features, such as commenting and posting, but news reading and AI summarization remain live in the version that lives today.

Instagram co-founders' news aggregation startup Artifact to shut down

Posts enters world of X and Threads with feature from Artifact