Yahoo has officially acquired the AI news app Artifact, originally built by Instagram co-founders, and will be using its technology across the company.
In this move, Artifact will no longer be a standalone app but the technology will be integrated across the site and the Yahoo News app in the months to come.
Created in January 2023, the AI app never really picked up or gained any traction. The co-founder’s mission was to push the most relevant stories to users through artificial intelligence, utilizing proprietary technology to provide a curated news experience.
In a press release published on Tuesday (April 2) it’s said that what the app founders have created ‘will be even more impactful with the scale of the Yahoo News network.’
The acquisition was officially completed on March 29 2024 and Artifact’s co-founders, CEO Kevin Systrom and CTO, Mike Krieger, will work with the web services provider in an advisory capacity during the transition.
The CEO and co-founder of Artifact Kevin Systrom explains more: “We built an intuitive product experience that users love and has the opportunity to benefit millions of people.
“Yahoo brings the scale to help the product achieve what we envisioned while upholding the belief that connecting people to the trusted sources of news and information is as critical as ever.
“AI has allowed us to give users a better experience discovering great content they care about. Yahoo recognizes that opportunity, and we could not be more excited to see what we’ve built live on through Yahoo News.”
What is Artifact?
Artifact is a personalized social news aggregator app that used machine learning technology to suggest articles, topics and authors to its users.
It was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and launched by their company Nokto, Inc. While the focus was on written news, they did include audio versions of the articles which were read out loud by AI-generated voices, including a simulation of the voices of Snoop Dog and Gwyneth Paltrow.
A year after launch, in January 2024, the team published a blog post titled ‘Shutting down Artifact.’ The CEO said they’ve ‘built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.’
