Yahoo is acquiring Instagram co-founders’ AI-powered news startup Artifact

Yahoo is acquiring AI-powered news app Artifact from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the company announced Tuesday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app, and its proprietary AI-powered personalization technology will be integrated across Yahoo, including the Yahoo News app, in the coming months. Yahoo is the parent company of TechCrunch.

Systrom and Krieger will work with Yahoo in an “advisory capacity” during the transition.

The announcement comes just months after Artifact said it would cease operations because the market opportunity was not large enough to warrant continued investment. Although Artifact started out as a simple news app, the end result appeared to be a Twitter replacement. There is already a lot of competition in that space with many competitors, including Meta Threads.

Artifact’s technology serves content that users want to see and over time it adapts to their interests. As a result, users receive a personalized feed of news stories that they want to read. The app also includes several AI tools to summarize news, rewrite clickbait headlines, and present the best content. Yahoo says that bringing these capabilities to its portfolio “accelerates the opportunity to engage users with even richer content experiences and tailored personalization.”

“Artifact has become a beloved product and we are thrilled to be able to evolve 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 ” Kat Downs Mulder, SVP and general manager of Yahoo News, in a press release.

Systrom said in the press release that Artifact’s technology has the opportunity to benefit millions of people, and “Yahoo brings the scale to help the product achieve what we envisioned, while maintaining the confidence “As critical as ever.”