![]() He also had an affinity for old, funky things. Shifting Burbn into a camera-first app delighted Systrom. ![]() It was much more Twitter-like than Facebook-ish. The photos would appear in a feed, a constant stream shared by people you chose to “follow.” It also nudged users into a performance mode, as by default any user could see your photos. It would be primal, pre-linguistic, and lend itself to endless creativity. The app, written for the iPhone, would open to a camera, ready to capture and transmit a visual signal to the world that showed not just where you were and who you were with, but who you were. Systrom and Krieger decided to rewrite Burbn to concentrate on that aspect. “Our attempts at explaining what we were building was often met with blank stares, and we peaked at around 1,000 users.” The founders noted that photo sharing, which was envisioned as a slideshow in the app, seemed to be the most popular feature. “It wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire,” Krieger would later write in an account of Instagram’s beginnings. Over the next few weeks, the Burbn beta testers became a small but loyal community. Sounds like an excellent “hed,” as we write in the news business. But the core tenet here is that machine learning is going to drive the next wave.” That can be news articles or music or shopping. What I care most about is that people should consume what matters most to them, and not what matters most to someone who decides to post it. You start off with that specific, you build product market fit, and as you gain success, you expand the aperture of your mission. “In new companies you always start off with something fairly specific, whether it's Apple and personal computers, or Amazon and books, or Facebook and colleges. Systrom’s full answer is a good encapsulation of how one of Silicon Valley’s savviest founders sees opportunity in the current AI moment. Indeed, when I asked Systrom whether journalism was merely an entry point for Artifact-in the same way that Amazon began its march to ecommerce dominance through bookselling-his answer was a straightforward yes! So don’t be surprised when Artifact branches out. Remember, from the very start, Systrom and Krieger’s goal was to use AI to solve a problem, not to improve reading habits. But that doesn’t mean that the startup’s ultimate destiny will be limited to improving the quality of news consumption. The new feature illustrates how seriously Artifact’s founders take their avowed mission to deliver the most relevant stories to users. I’d argue that there is at least an unspoken rule that third parties shouldn’t mess with the content of stories they link to, and headlines-even clickbaity ones-are indeed content. “There’s no rule that says any link to content needs to be the title that someone else decided to show you, because that can be manipulative, or it can be misleading,” he says. But he makes no apologies for rewriting the ones that users flag as deceptive. Systrom says that Artifact will un-bait only a small minority of stories. Ideally, the content each user wants to see, from publications vetted for reliability. But unlike the links displayed on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, what determines the selection and ranking is not who is suggesting them, but the content of the stories themselves. Artifact delivers what looks like a standard feed containing links to news stories, with headlines and descriptive snippets. That problem is the difficulty of finding individually relevant, high-quality news articles-the ones people most want to see-and not having to wade through irrelevant clickbait, misleading partisan cant, and low-calorie distractions to get those stories. 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. 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. But not Artifact, the news discovery app created by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. 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).
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