The co-founders of Instagram have opened a public waitlist for their new app, Artifact.

Artifact describes itself as a personalised news feed driven by artificial intelligence.

The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organisations to smaller blogs about niche topics. As users tap on articles that interest them, Artifact’s algorithm tunes users’ pages over time to offer up similar stories and posts in the future.

Artifact’s co-creators Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger told The Verge that users who come in from the waitlist will see only the app’s central ranked feed, but that the app’s beta users are currently testing two more features that Systrom expects to become core pillars of the app.

One is a feed showing articles posted by users that you have chosen to follow, along with their commentary on those posts, while the second is a direct message inbox wherein users can discuss the posts they read privately with friends.

Systrom said that he and Krieger did not want to start a new company until three things happened: a big new wave in consumer technology arose that he and Krieger could attempt to catch; a way to connect that wave to social technology; and an idea for how their product could solve a problem.

Commenting on TikTok’s functionality to show users content by using only algorithmic predictions, Systrom said: “I saw that shift, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the future of social.’”

Share Story: