BuzzFeed, the U.S.-based media company known best for its quizzes, listicles, and, for a time, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism division, is reinventing itself for the AI era. At least, that’s the pitch.

At the SXSW conference in Austin, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti introduced the company’s next media foray: a spin-off called Branch Office, which will explore artificial intelligence in consumer-facing apps designed for creativity and connection.

The new company is an extension of the experiments BuzzFeed has run for years using AI technology, Peretti explained, in a halting presentation that began with slideshow glitches, before moving on to app demos met with silence or a polite tittering.

“We’ve been working on this secretly for over a year, and we’ve learned a lot from the BuzzFeed platform about what is coming with new kinds of AI formats,” Peretti said. “Using AI is the way of connecting people, building community around these pillars of culture, and taste, and community.”

Bill Shouldis, a director of product at BuzzFeed and the founder of Branch Office, presented two of the company’s new apps: BF Island and Conjure.

The first product, BF Island, is a group chat platform offering features for changing and editing photos using AI. This is not exactly groundbreaking tech in and of itself, but that’s not the point.

The key feature here is not the AI toolset but the in-app library of online trends and memes, created by an editorial team, which could inspire users to create AI photos referencing blink-and-you-miss-it trends like the McDonald’s CEO taste-testing a burger or the “frame-mogging” drama. (If you don’t know what these are, you’re probably not the “very online” audience that’s being targeted.)

The other app, Conjure, is similar to BeReal — the once-a-day temporary photo app — except that it instead appears to guide users to take daily photos of things besides themselves. (As a reminder, BeReal didn’t stick, ultimately exiting to Voodoo after losing traction.) In the demo, for instance, the photo prompt was “What lies between the trees and the moon?,” leading the users to snap a photo of the night sky. A series of spooky images flashed on the screen, followed by a whispered, “What will you conjure?”

We don’t get it, and clearly the audience didn’t either. After the demo, a lone cough could be heard among the silence, followed by uncomfortable laughter.

Shouldis then noted that AI is involved in Conjure, too, as the app has an “AI spirit for a CEO.” (Again, what?)

Peretti also introduced Quiz Party, a social app that lets you take BuzzFeed quizzes with friends and share your results.

BuzzFeed’s underwhelming presentation comes only days after the media company shared that it has “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a business and was engaging in strategic conversations focused on fixing its liquidity challenges. The company, which had a net loss of $57.3 million last year, said it would focus this year on its Studio IP and new AI apps, like these.

But even the tech-forward audience at SXSW was not convinced.

As one person pointed out during the Q&A session after the presentation, BeReal had struggled to get people to come back after the novelty wore off. What would an app like Conjure do to combat the same sort of retention problem?

Shouldis said that the app would evolve “and have different types of things happening and not just be exactly what it is today.” He referenced the potential to integrate things like video, audio, and prototyping with Claude Code to build community.

The premise behind the new apps is not unreasonable: AI can lead to faster software development, which makes it possible for companies to more quickly iterate and keep people engaged.

“In a way, software is the new content,” Peretti noted.

Of course, before you can iterate, you have to attract users. With its new apps, BuzzFeed seems to have thought more about what AI can do than what people want to do with AI, which is not a recipe for success.

After their dramatic falling-out, it doesn’t seem as though Anthropic and the Pentagon are getting back together.

Instead, the Pentagon is building tools to replace Anthropic’s AI, according to a Bloomberg conversation with Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and AI officer at the Pentagon.

“The Department is actively pursuing multiple LLMs into the appropriate government-owned environments,” he said. “Engineering work has begun on these LLMs, and we expect to have them available for operational use very soon.”

Anthropic’s $200 million contract with the Department of Defense (DOD) broke down over the last several weeks after the two parties failed to come to an agreement over the degree to which the military could obtain unrestricted access to Anthropic’s AI.

While Anthropic sought to include a contractual clause that prohibits the Pentagon from using its AI for mass surveillance of Americans or to deploy weapons that can fire without human intervention, the Pentagon didn’t budge. Instead, OpenAI swooped in and made its own agreement with the Pentagon. The Department of Defense — known under the Trump administration as the Department of War — also signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s xAI to use Grok in classified systems.

It makes sense, then, why the Pentagon would be working on phasing Anthropic’s technology out of its workflows. While some reports said there was a small possibility that Anthropic would reconcile with the Pentagon, this news suggests that the government is preparing to forge ahead without them.

In fact, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a designation usually reserved for foreign adversaries, which bars companies that work with the Pentagon from working with Anthropic as well. Anthropic is challenging this designation in court.

As AI takes over the internet, Palo Alto-based search engine Kagi is bringing its handpicked collection of non-commercial, human-authored websites to mobile devices through new “Small Web” apps for iOS and Android. The “Small Web,” in Kagi’s definition, includes sites created by individuals, like personal blogs, webcomics, independent videos, and more.

These are the types of properties that formed the basis of the early web, before it became dominated by ad-supported business models and platforms controlled by large corporations. They’re also increasingly the kind of sites that can be harder to discover on today’s web, where so much content is infused with, if not directly authored by, AI.

The search startup first launched its idea for a “Small Web” initiative in 2023, designed to promote this kind of content in its search results and through a dedicated website. In March, the company announced it’s expanding these efforts with browser extensions, mobile apps, and a way to filter results by category.

The Small Web website is like a modern-day StumbleUpon as it randomly displays one of the selected sites, then lets you click a “next” button to move to another. Like StumbleUpon, the goal is to help users discover the parts of the web they might otherwise have missed.

With the addition of categories, users can now limit discovery to just those topics of interest from the more than 30,000 “Small Web” sites in Kagi’s index.

These are also available in Kagi’s new mobile apps for iOS and Android and its browser extensions. Here, you can select what sort of content you’d like to see, like videos, blogs, code repositories, or comics. You can also view a list of recently viewed or popular sites, and read them in a distraction-free mode. Plus, you can save your favorite sites and articles to return to later.

While the initiative to make less-trafficked parts of the indie web more visible is a worthy one — especially at a time when AI-generated content is masquerading as human creation — some Kagi users complain that the Small Web product isn’t going far enough.

On the discussion forum Hacker News, one person pointed out that Kagi is limiting its selection to sites with RSS feeds that have recent posts, ruling out unique, single-purpose websites or experimental pages from being included in Kagi’s collection. Another was frustrated when they came across a supposed “Small Web” site that sounded suspiciously like it may have been written with AI.

Still, the concept of a human-curated web of content that’s also written by humans could be something worth building, especially if Kagi’s original concept of becoming a Google alternative by offering a premium, paid search engine doesn’t pan out.

In the meantime, people can suggest new sites for the Small Web via its GitHub page.