Creators of Instagram are shutting down their AI-powered news app in the near future.

Instagram is still at the top of the app charts with billions of users and new features, but their founders have decided to end one of the projects due to market changes. The app called Artifact is an artificial intelligence-powered platform that brings together news and food for people in a crisp way. It’s being shut down just a year after it was launched by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.

The founders feel that an AI-powered platform is probably not the best use of their investment and would rather work on something that can generate stable returns. “We’ve built something that our core user base loves, but we’ve come to the conclusion that the market opportunity is not large enough to warrant further investment in this way,” Systrom wrote.

It is interesting to hear this statement from the founders at a time when tools powered by artificial intelligence are gaining visibility and popularity among consumers. Artifact came out 12 months ago and since then has added features like AI-powered summaries and a few others.

Problems began to form for Systrom and Co. when they had to start planning to expand the team, which required more investment. And as the comment above suggests, they clearly didn’t want to do that.

Aggregating news content is a viable model, even with AI, but adopting a content moderation strategy is just as important, and that’s where the two decided to pull the plug before going deeper into the product. There’s a reason Instagram chose to stay out of the news and even Threads, which is supposed to be Twitter’s (now X) competitor, also avoided focusing on the news.

So what happens to people who use the Artifact? The platform will phase out the features in the coming weeks and disable user commenting and new posts. The main news gathering engine will continue until the end of February, but after that the application will stop working. Systrom says he’s excited about AI in general, so it’s likely both founders will return with AI in a new avatar.