Four years after Instagram’s co-founders left the company, they are back with a new app called Artifact — “a personalized news feed” powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who sold Instagram to Facebook for $715 million in 2012, announced the launch of Artifact this week.
In an Instagram post, Krieger said he and Systrom “have been working with a talented team” for more than a year to launch the service. “We’re gradually letting people in as we scale up,” Krieger said. The app is not yet publicly available but a wait list has been opened to the public.
The news aggregation app that combines articles, facts, and artificial intelligence is driven by a TikTok-like recommendation algorithm. Artifact has been described as “TikTok for text” by Platformer, which was the first to report the launch.
The development that enabled Artifact was the transformer, which Google invented in 2017. The Transformer-based architecture is used in many state-of-the-art language models, including ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) developed by OpenAI. Transformer-based models like ChatGPT are able to perform well on a wide range of language tasks, including text generation, machine translation, and text classification.
