Artifact closed shop in January 2024. Particle just announced a $4.4M round. Interesting!
I used Artifact about 5 days and churned once it became clear the content it surfaced wasn't novel or high-quality. I could find the same stories on the websites I habitually visited and trust, while avoiding the junk.
Questions that spring to my mind:
- What lessons did Particle learn from Artifact?
- What will Particle do differently?
- Haven't we learned that the "fairly compensates authors and publishers" idea is structurally challenged due to the nature of the internet?
- Maybe insightful, maybe not: Facebook plans to shut down its news tab in the US and Australia
In theory, the promise of an AI-driven content recommender is that it doesn’t matter how much dreck is out there: the goal is to only surface the good stuff. That raises a further question: was Artifact’s AI just not good enough, or is there simply not that much good content on the web these days? The answer is probably a bit of both, but there is a reason I made the case last week that content businesses that succeed on the Internet do so by credibly offering a guarantee of the ongoing production of content you will like. For now that means having an integrated branded offering, like the New York Times or Stratechery; both models are in stark contrast to Artifact, which had no integration into content creation and simply attempted to skim the best of the open web. It may be the case that there just isn’t that much good stuff out there.
[The Verge] Instagram’s co-founders are shutting down their Artifact news app
Since launching at the end of January 2023, Artifact has added a bunch of new and interesting features, like AI-powered article summaries, the ability to comment on articles within Artifact, and the ability to mark articles as clickbait (and then rewrite them using AI). It’s broadened from just focusing on news by letting people post links to share cool stuff on the web and a Twitter-like posts feature.
[Tech Crunch] Former Twitter engineers are building Particle, an AI-powered news reader, backed by $4.4M
Particle.news, which entered into private beta over the weekend, is a new startup offering a personalized, “multi-perspective” news reading experience that not only leverages AI to summarize the news, but also aims to do so in a way that fairly compensates authors and publishers.
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