Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the company announced Tuesday. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app and its proprietary AI-based personalization technology will be integrated into Yahoo, including the Yahoo News app in the coming months. Yahoo is the parent company of TechCrunch.
Systrom and Krieger will work with Yahoo in an advisory capacity during this transition.
This announcement comes a few months after Artifact announced it would cease operations because the market opportunity was not significant enough to justify continued investment. Although Artifact started as a simple news app, the end result looked more like a Twitter replacement. There is already a lot of competition in this space with many competitors, including Meta’s Threads.
Artifact’s technology surfaces the content users want to see and becomes more tailored to their interests over time. As a result, users receive a personalized feed of news they want to read. The app also included several AI tools to summarize news, rewrite clickbait headlines, and present the best content. Yahoo says integrating these features into its portfolio “accelerates the ability to connect users with even richer content experiences and tailored personalization.”
“Artifact has become a beloved product and we are excited to be able to continue to develop this technology and continue our mission to become the trusted guide to digital information and the best curator connecting people to the content that matters most to them,” said Kat Downs Mulder, executive vice president and general manager of Yahoo News, in a press release.
Systrom said in the press release that Artifact’s technology has the opportunity to benefit millions of people and that “Yahoo brings the scale needed to help the product achieve what we envision while maintaining the belief that Connecting people to trusted sources of news and information is as easy as it gets. always so critical. »
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