A return to web classics. Just over ten years after Instagram was sold to Meta (formerly Facebook) for $715 million, the app’s founders are launching a new social network dedicated to news. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger confided their ambitions to our colleagues from The Verge.
A TikTok-like experience
A little less than five years after their departure from Facebook in 2018, the two innovation enthusiasts have just launched the private beta of their new network, Artifact. A sort of TikTok intended for textual content, the service offers its users a news feed with the sole content of articles. Papers from the historical pillars of the press, such as the New York Timeswill be offered, but also news produced by more modest sites, such as thematic blogs.
Like the thread “For you” of TikTok, Artifact’s main page will provide a personalized experience for each user. An artificial intelligence-based machine learning algorithm identifies your reading tastes to suggest new articles that may be of interest to you. A principle which seems to take over, in part, the basis of Google News, which offers a unique user experience, with papers adapted to the tastes of each Internet user.
The social network will also allow you to follow the reading recommendations of your friends, or to chat with them by private message.
Next opening to the public
“Over the years, what I’ve seen is that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things get better very quickly.“, estimates Kevin Systrom. To offer a personalized experience to the user, the AI developed by the company is based on Transformer, a neural network architecture for language understanding launched in 2017 by Google. This technology notably forms the basis of GPT-3 and its conversational agent ChatGPT.
For now, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger and their small team of seven people have not identified a clear business model to ensure the profitability of their business. The first avenues are emerging, however, with the possibility of resorting, quite conventionally, to advertising or even signing revenue-sharing agreements with publishers.
For now, only a limited audience of beta testers can access the service. The opening could happen quite quickly, with availability in stride for Android and iOS. A form allowing to be informed of the launch of the network is accessible on artifact.news.
