Artifact, a news aggregation and recommendation app developed by Instagram’s co-founders, has been purchased by Yahoo. The standalone operation of Artifact will be discontinued following the acquisition. In the forthcoming months, Artifact’s artificial intelligence (AI) personalization technology and other capabilities will be absorbed into Yahoo News and other related products.
The acquisition was completed last week, but the financial details of the deal remain undisclosed. During the transition period, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Artifact, will serve advisory roles to Yahoo, which incidentally is also the parent company of Engadget.
Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Artifact, expressed his excitement about the acquisition in a press release. He said, “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.”
Since its launch in January last year, Artifact has made a modest impact by attracting users with its robust story discovery system. The app leveraged AI-driven technology to enhance its personalized news feed over time and incorporated features that offered news summaries.
However, notwithstanding the addition of social features like user profiles and comment voting, Artifact was unable to replicate the same level of success as Instagram and couldn’t attract a sufficiently large user base. In response to this, Systrom and Krieger decided to close down Artifact in January, but they continued managing its operations for a while longer before eventually selling it.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that Yahoo has acquired an app that utilizes AI for news summarization. More than a decade ago, Yahoo purchased Summly. Similar to the case of Artifact, Summly was shut down after the acquisition, and the technology powering it was incorporated into other Yahoo products.
