The invasion of chatbots has disrupted the plans of countless businesses, including some that had been working on that very technology for years (looking at you, Google). But not Artifact, the news discovery app created by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When I talked to Systrom this week about his startup—a much-anticipated follow-up to the billion-user social network that’s been propping up Meta for the past few years—he was emphatic that Artifact is a product of the recent AI revolution, even though it was devised before GPT began its chatting. In fact, Systrom says that he and Krieger started with the idea of exploiting the powers of machine learning—and then ended up with a news app after scrounging around for a serious problem that AI could help solve.
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