“We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way,” Systrom wrote.

Since launching final yr, Artifact added a number of new options together with AI-powered article summaries, the power to touch upon and mark articles as clickbait, and a Twitter-like posting characteristic. However, these latter options required intensive moderation that Artifact’s small 8-person workforce couldn’t sufficiently help.

To assist the transition, Artifact will start winding down options over the subsequent few weeks, beginning with disabling the power to make new posts and feedback. Existing posts will stay seen quickly because the workforce works to scale back moderation wants. The app’s core information aggregation functionality will proceed working by means of the top of February to provide customers time to seek out different providers.

Systrom remained upbeat in regards to the future regardless of Artifact’s shutdown, saying he was personally excited to discover new concepts within the AI house which appears filled with potentialities. The elevated competitors out there for Twitter-like dialog platforms and slowing development of reports aggregators seemingly contributed to Artifact’s struggles to discover a clear product-market match.

While Artifact tried to distinguish itself by means of AI-powered options like rewritten article summaries, its identification by no means totally coalesced right into a coherent providing. It hadn’t clearly outlined itself as a dialog platform, hyperlink sharing service, or AI-enhanced information engine. This diffuse focus coupled with the calls for of content material moderation made it difficult to scale.