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Yahoo is buying Artifact, the AI news app from the Instagram co-founders

Yahoo News is bigger than you’d think — and it’s getting a big dose of AI.

“We have built something that a core group of users love,” the co-founders wrote in January, “but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.” They said that the biggest reason to shut down was in order to focus on “newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people.” The bet behind Artifact was always that AI had the potential to be a huge, internet-changing technology; maybe there were just more interesting things to work on than a news app without a big news audience. The company first began exploring an Artifact acquisition after reading that shutdown letter, says Kat Downs Mulder, the general manager for Yahoo News. Downs Mulder says more than 180 million people come to Yahoo’s properties every month, which puts Artifact’s personalization and recommendation tech in front of a vastly larger set of users than it likely ever would have gotten on its own.

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