Meta: AI speeds app development, more new apps coming

Meta is leaning heavily on artificial intelligence to accelerate app development, and the company has signaled that a fresh wave of new applications is on the horizon. During this week’s second-quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the social media giant is actively building more apps, building on a recent flurry of launches that included a dedicated platform for Marketplace sellers, a standalone app for Facebook Groups, a vibe-coded gaming app, a new photo-sharing tool from Instagram, and an experimental AI bedtime story feature.

For years, Meta has struggled to spin off successful standalone social apps beyond its core properties. Now, the company argues that large language models (LLMs) are changing the game, enabling faster software releases and more rapid testing of new concepts. “I’m … excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development,” Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday’s call. “Earlier this year, we shipped Instagram Instants. We also just launched Forum, a stand-alone Groups app, and Seller, a stand-alone Marketplace app. I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps. So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them,” he added.

Zuckerberg further emphasized that AI is improving Meta’s core business by making its apps more relevant and delivering stronger results for advertisers. “We’re starting to deliver more novel products, and we’ll have a lot more there soon as well,” he said.

This isn’t Meta’s first attempt at incubating new apps. In its earlier days, the company (then known as Facebook) operated Creative Labs, an internal incubator that tested social concepts like the photo-sharing app Slingshot, the anonymous chat app Rooms, a Flipboard competitor called Paper, the Moments photo-sharing app, and the collaborative video app Riff. Those experiments ended in 2015, with all apps eventually shuttered due to a lack of audience traction.

Meta tried again in the early 2020s through its NPE Team R&D group, which produced a slew of apps including the chat app Bump, social music app Aux, task app Move, dating app Spark, calling app CatchUp, zine maker E.gg, events app Venue, creator Q&A app Hotline, Cameo competitor Super, couples app Tuned, and music app BARS. Once more, none achieved breakout success, and they were all shut down.

Today, Meta can point to at least one success story where AI has helped scale a new app. Threads, now boasting 500 million monthly active users, represents a modest hit. Zuckerberg has frequently predicted that Threads will eventually become Meta’s next billion-user app. The company learned to heavily leverage its existing user base to seed the app initially, then aggressively promoted it across Facebook and Instagram. But LLMs have also been a key growth driver, as Meta reports “significant gains” from AI-powered content recommendations.

“We are finding that LLMs are increasingly capable of delivering ranking and recommendations gains,” Meta’s CFO Susan Li told investors on the call. “First, they make our existing systems smarter by understanding what the content is actually about and generating better training data. Second, LLM-powered agents are also helping with engineering development by evaluating content quality, detecting trends, and testing ranking changes.” Li added that earlier this year, Meta reached a milestone: every Reel and Feed post on Instagram is now automatically processed through an LLM and analyzed for topic and tone, which helps improve recommendations.

The company is also developing LLM-native recommendation systems, which could help scale new apps more effectively as they launch. Investors on the call were more focused on AI spending and Meta’s growing enterprise ambitions than on the specifics of new apps. Still, Zuckerberg hinted that the wait won’t be long, stating that the “new consumer products” are “releasing soon.”