has bought , the news aggregation and recommendation app from co-founders. The app will no longer operate as a standalone service. Yahoo will fold Artifact’s AI personalization tech and other features into products including Yahoo News in the coming months.
Terms of the deal, which closed last week, were not disclosed. Artifact founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger will advise Yahoo (Tech Reader’s parent company) during the transition.
“AI has allowed us to give users a better experience discovering great content they care about,” Artifact CEO Systrom said “Yahoo recognizes that opportunity, and we could not be more excited to see what we’ve built live on through Yahoo News.”
Artifact and it picked up a bit of steam thanks to its solid discovery system that surfaced stories users by and large wanted to read (it delivered me a nice blend of gaming, breaking news and architecture stories). The app aimed to improve its personalized news feed over time. It did an effective job of that while incorporating other AI-powered features such as news summaries.
However, the app didn’t quite take off in the same way as Instagram. While the team behind it did such as profiles, comment voting and so on, Artifact just didn’t find a big enough audience. Systrom and Krieger announced plans to back in January, but the pair actually a while longer by themselves until selling it.
As it happens, Yahoo bought another app that used AI to summarize news, Summly, . Similarly, it shut down that app and folded the tech behind Summly into .
