Digg Revives as AI News Aggregator, Promises More Verticals

Digg is back again and has taken on yet another form: A website that aggregates news about artificial intelligence. "[T]he internet has more noise than ever, and the people who can sort signal from it have never been more valuable," Digg CEO Kevin Rose explained in his announcement. "Digg's job is to find that signal and bring it to you." AI is just the beginning, he said, calling it the "noisiest, fastest-moving space on the internet." He promised that more verticals are coming, but he didn't say when Digg will start aggregating news about other topics. At the moment, the website follows 1,000 people directly involved in AI research, investing and media, built from X's social graph. OpenAI's Sam Altman is at the top of the list, along with Elon Musk, OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, AI pioneer Yann LeCun, and former chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud Fei-Fei Li, among many other personalities. The new website is live at di.gg while it's still in alpha. Rose says that when the company is ready, it's moving back to digg.com, though it's unclear if that will happen once it has more verticals to offer. If you'll recall, Digg launched an open beta in January in an attempt to come back, but it shut down just two months later. The company said at the time that it was targeted by SEO spammers mere hours after the launch. Digg wasn't ready to fight off bots at the scale and the speed that they flooded the website, and the tools the team deployed weren't enough. Justin Mezzell, the company CEO, admitted at the time that the votes and comments on the website couldn't be trusted due to all the bot activity.