Yahoo bought AI-powered news app Artifact from Instagram’s co-founders
The app is shutting down and its tech will be folded into Yahoo’s products.
Yahoo has bought Artifact, the news aggregation and recommendation app from Instagram’s co-founders. The app will no longer operate as a standalone service. Yahoo will fold Artifact's AI personalization tech and other features into products including Yahoo News in the coming months.
Terms of the deal, which closed last week, were not disclosed. Artifact founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger will advise Yahoo (Engadget’s parent company) during the transition.
“AI has allowed us to give users a better experience discovering great content they care about,” Artifact CEO Systrom said in a press release. “Yahoo recognizes that opportunity, and we could not be more excited to see what we’ve built live on through Yahoo News.”
Artifact debuted in January last year and it picked up a bit of steam thanks to its solid discovery system that surfaced stories users by and large wanted to read (it delivered me a nice blend of gaming, breaking news and architecture stories). The app aimed to improve its personalized news feed over time. It did an effective job of that while incorporating other AI-powered features such as news summaries.
However, the app didn’t quite take off in the same way as Instagram. While the team behind it did add social features such as profiles, comment voting and so on, Artifact just didn’t find a big enough audience. Systrom and Krieger announced plans to shut down Artifact back in January, but the pair actually kept it running a while longer by themselves until selling it.
As it happens, Yahoo bought another app that used AI to summarize news, Summly, over a decade ago. Similarly, it shut down that app and folded the tech behind Summly into other products.
