Yahoo has officially acquired Artifact, the AI news app originally built by Instagram's co-founder, and will use the technology across the company.
With this move, Artifact will no longer be a standalone app, but the technology will be integrated across the site and Yahoo News app in the coming months.
Created in January 2023, this AI app never really gained traction or traction. The co-founders' mission was to provide a curated news experience using proprietary technology, pushing the most relevant stories to users through artificial intelligence.
A press release published Tuesday (April 2) said that what the app's founders have created “will only grow in impact as the Yahoo News Network scales.”
The acquisition will officially close on March 29, 2024, and Artifact co-founders CEO Kevin Systrom and CTO Mike Krieger will work with the web service provider in an advisory capacity during the transition period. Become.
Kevin Systrom, CEO and co-founder of Artifact, explains:
“Yahoo brings the scale to help our product achieve what we envisioned, while remaining true to our belief that connecting people to trusted news and information sources is as important as ever.
“AI allows us to provide a better experience for our users to find great content they are interested in. Yahoo recognizes that opportunity and is excited to share what we have built with Yahoo News. I couldn’t be more excited to see it live.”
What is an artifact?
Artifact is a personalized social news aggregator app that uses machine learning technology to suggest articles, topics, and authors to users.
It was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and launched by their company Nokto, Inc. While the focus was on textual news, it also included audio versions of articles read out loud with AI-generated voices, including simulations of articles. Voices of Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow.
In January 2024, a year after launch, the team published a blog post titled “Shutdown Artifact.” “While we have built something that our core user group likes, we have concluded that the market opportunity is not large enough to justify this continued investment,” the CEO said in a statement.
Featured image: Image by Simon from Pixabay
