Yahoo has acquired the AI-powered news aggregator app Artifact, launched by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in January 2023.
Following the announcement on Tuesday, the Artifact app was shut down, with plans to integrate its proprietary AI-powered personalisation tech into Yahoo News and other Yahoo products in the coming months.
The acquisition shouldn’t surprise anyone, as Artifact was winding down operations earlier this year. Systrom commented, “We have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way”. The founder’s note only increased the general interest in acquiring Artifact, and Yahoo soon came knocking.
“Yahoo was one of the first to combine human and algorithmic curation of news. Since then, the landscape of machine learning and personalization has changed dramatically and Artifact has innovated with best-in-class technology to meet the moment,” said Kat Downs Mulder, SVP and General Manager of Yahoo News.
While there has been no comment on the acquisition cost, it has been made clear that Yahoo is acquiring the app and its tech, not the team. However, Systrom and Krieger will stay on in an advisory role but will not join Yahoo.
“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,” said Kevin Systrom, CEO and Co-Founder of Artifact.
Though a useful app for aggregating and recommending news, Artifact failed to take off; however, with this acquisition and Yahoo’s reported 185 million readers, the tech behind Artifact should soon be put to good use.
“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 trusted sources of news and information is as critical as ever,” Systrom added.
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