Yahoo acquires news aggregator app built by Instagram co-founders for its AI

News and information giant Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the news aggregator built by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, for its AI news recommendation algorithm.

Artifact cofounders had earlier announced they would be winding down the app's operations. (Yahoo)

The reports of the death of the Artifact app were not greatly exaggerated. Yahoo on Tuesday announced that it acquired the news aggregator app created by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app, but its AI-powered personalisation technology will be integrated across Yahoo products like the Yahoo news app.

Artifact launched in January 2023, and about a year later, Systrom and Krieger announced that it would be shutting down. “We have 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,” Systrom wrote at the time in a blog post.

In the year following its launch and preceding its demise, Artifact got many new features including AI summaries of articles, a Twitter-like posting feature and the ability to allow users to comment on and mark articles as clickbait. But some of these features required a lot of moderation — something that the app’s eight-person team could not quite handle.

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The app’s AI-powered algorithm recommended news and other articles to users based on their interests and previous reading habits. While this was a powerful tool that found a fervent fan audience, the app never really found widespread appeal. Enter Yahoo, which is still one of the biggest news and information properties in the world with hundreds of millions of readers.

“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. Artifact has become a beloved product and we’re thrilled to be able to continue to grow that technology and further our mission of becoming the trusted guide to digital information and the best curator connecting people to the content that matters most to them.” said Kat Downs Mulder, SVP and General Manager of Yahoo News, in a press statement.

Systrom added in a statement that he hopes the intuitive product experience can finally achieve the scale that he and Krieger envisioned.