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BuzzFeed, known for its many bizarre quizzes in the 2000s, launched a company called Branch Office, an independent subsidiary designed to rethink how people communicate online in the age of artificial intelligence.
BuzzFeed Founder and CEO Jonah Peretti and Branch Office Founder Bill Schodice announced the announcement South by southwest In Austin, Texas, the team has secretly developed a list of beta apps, with the first two out now and more on the way this year. The project arose out of years of BuzzFeed AI experiments, from quirky little games to chaotic chatbots, as the company began to see a different path for the technology. Instead of using AI to flood the internet with more content or trap people inside algorithmic feeds, the idea was to build new kinds of social experiences that help people create things together and connect with their friends.
The founders said the branch is more like a creative studio than a traditional tech startup. The guiding influence is Nintendo and its philosophy of creating amazing things out of existing technology.
The first applications follow that spirit. Conjure sends you a daily shooting message wrapped in strange, unfolding lore. BF Island turns the language of group chats into a collaborative playground for inside jokes and video clips. Quiz Party brings the classic BuzzFeed quiz into a shared space where friends compare scores and debate each other in real time.
The bet behind it all is very simple. Buzzfeed predicts that as AI makes content unlimited, cheap and easy to produce, the real value online will come from community, culture and taste.
“We are accelerating toward an era of endless fake news, personalization bubbles and cuts to organizations that actually care about content,” Peretti said. “We need a solution. The branch office is that solution.”