News aggregation startup artifact Co-founder Kevin Systrom doesn’t believe in AI fatalism, even though he’s developing a new app that incorporates novel AI technology. Speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, the Instagram co-founder said that while it’s good that people are questioning the potential impact of AI, these technologies are helping people realize that they have “superpowers.” “I feel that there is a higher possibility that it will happen.”
“My sense is that when new technologies come out, people always look at these new technologies and say to themselves, there’s going to be no jobs. I’m going to kill this. These are the problems,” he said. “And if you look back at the history of all the great revolutions – the Internet, the PC, the mobile phone – imagine how much they have unlocked in our lives.” Systrom He continued.
“Indeed, the jobs have disappeared. Classroom teaching and education have changed to a situation where it was previously believed that people were writing their own papers, but now they may not do so.” We just adapt. We just find a way to adapt, and all of a sudden we realize there’s a new job,” Systrom added. “Thanks to these technologies, people can gain superpowers. And I think it’s much more likely that that will happen,” he said.
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His position stands in contrast to many in the AI field who are warning of potential AI existential risks. These include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, veteran AI computer scientist Jeffrey Hinton, MIT’s Max Tegmark, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, musician Grimes, and These include broadcaster Sam Harris, who signed a recent statement urging global attention to AI. , to name a few examples.
Systrom’s app, co-founded with Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, leverages modern AI in new ways to create a better news viewing experience. This area can be potentially challenging given the abundance of clickbait and fake news.and Artifacts give users a personalized news reading experience, as well as the ability to curate other users’ links.
The app uses AI to perform a variety of tasks, including summarizing news articles, rewriting clickbait headlines in a more factual way, and personalizing the selection of news presented to end users.
The power of AI also allows Artifact to prioritize showing the best content, but not necessarily the stories that get the most clicks. In fact, Systrom says one of the amazing things about Artifact is its ability to discover popular and unknown authors.
“The people who are doing really well, you probably don’t even know their names. And that’s one of the most exciting things about Artifact… In fact, there’s more and more opportunity for these writers to be discovered as independent personalities. I think there is,” he said.
Additionally, AI’s understanding of what stories are doing well on Artifact goes beyond click-through rates. Systrom contrasted Artificat with another app (which he declined to name) that recently launched a tab that features positive stories rather than top stories that tend to be more shocking and negative. The app in question, He SmartNews, operates in the same realm as His Artifact, but the approach is different.
“I was thinking to myself, or We can also create products that don’t always put people in terrible, terrible situations,” Systrom said. “Editorially speaking, I think we’re trying to shoot a certain quality, or at least a certain level of honesty, to provide an experience that’s more than a plane crash or something that gets a lot of attention and clicks,” he said. pointed out.
Systrom said part of his inspiration to build Artifact came from seeing the possibilities offered by AI. In social networking, AI now decides what users see, the founder explained. It’s not just who you follow that matters. It also concerns your interests.
“That was really exciting to me. I think I saw that on TikTok as well,” Systrom said. “So that was the passion. What’s the big problem in the world? . . . Information consumption, news consumption, especially peak consumption, is the big problem today.”
His goal was to create an app where news headlines were actually interesting and useful information, rather than just generated and shared using an algorithm. This led to the birth of Artifact’s latest release, Links, which allows anyone to share URLs that they think are noteworthy enough to resonate with other readers. This is also reflected in his personalization algorithms, which, again with the help of his AI, allow people to discover new content they wouldn’t have found otherwise.
What’s next for the app? Systrom doesn’t know, saying Artificat is still exploring product and market fit. He believes machine learning, LLM (Large-Scale Language Models) and mobile are keys to the app’s potential success, but the startup is still figuring out how to achieve scale.
“What clearly resonated with people was that instead of being tied to a particular publisher, people would be able to go far beyond that and discover interesting links anywhere through artificial intelligence.” he concluded.