This is the best summary I could come up with:
The two sides declined to share the cost of the acquisition, but both made clear Yahoo is acquiring Artifact’s tech rather than its team.
Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, Artifact’s co-founders, will be “special advisors” for Yahoo but won’t be joining the company.
“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.
“A lot of organizations care deeply about news and personalized content,” he says, “and I think they’re looking around and saying ‘Wow, there’s this new wave of AI… maybe we should figure out what’s going on.’ Maybe that’s what I discounted originally.”
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 News 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.
The original article contains 832 words, the summary contains 247 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Keep AI out of the news. Sigh.
It’s not all bad. Artifact uses “AI” to change clickbait titles into more descriptive ones for example.
Still a slippery-slope, IMO.
When something (news) is, by nature, designed to inform you of the current state of reality, introducing any process that hallucinates (read: makes shit up) should not be anywhere near them.
People are free to use LLM plugins to “de-clickbait” headlines as they want, but keep that out of the news process itself.
Just my 2 cents on it.
If people use clickbaity titles in the first place it’s cause they work, not because they don’t know how to write informative ones…
Edit: my bad, didn’t know what Artifact was…
I tried artifact for a bit, and the blog spam was so bad. Stuff would get promoted that would’ve never made it out of new on Reddit or Lemmy
Yeah, little control over presented articles was what led me to drop it when I was considering reddit alternatives but I’d kill for that de-clickbaiting feature to make way to RSS readers and link aggregators.
Wait yahoo still exists?
I don’t know how they’re structured / what they really do as a company now, but they do still seem to have a well-regarded news division (or, they at least aggregate quality content).
Well, they used to until I read this. Once they throw this AI nonsense into it, I’m bailing.
Every time I end up on Yahoo News, it’s an article that’s been republished from somewhere else. I have no idea what their business model is. Ads, I assume.
Yup. Everytime I need to test an internet connection I go to Yahoo cause I know the User wasn’t there so no cache version.
Hey is that lady still there at - Ah, no she left in 2017 after selling yahoo to verizon for almost 5 billion.
Crazypants.
Question (somewhat sarcastically): how has Yahoo! remained relevant and where does it even get its money from?
