Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors during the company’s second-quarter earnings call this week that artificial intelligence is enabling the social media giant to ship new standalone apps faster than ever before — and that more are on the way. Zuckerberg specifically cited recent launches including a dedicated app for Marketplace sellers, a Facebook Groups app called Forum, a vibe-coded gaming app, a new photos app from Instagram, and an experiment involving AI-generated bedtime stories.
AI as a product accelerator
“I’m excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development,” Zuckerberg told investors on the call. “Earlier this year, we shipped Instagram Instants. We also just launched Forum, a standalone Groups app, and Seller, a standalone 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.”
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The company has a long history of attempting — and failing — to produce breakout standalone social apps. In its earlier days, Meta (then Facebook) ran an internal incubator called Creative Labs, which produced apps like Slingshot, Rooms, Paper, Moments, and Riff. All were shuttered by 2015. In the early 2020s, a new R&D group called NPE Team tested apps including Bump, Aux, Move, Spark, CatchUp, and Super. Again, none achieved lasting traction.
Threads shows the AI advantage
Meta can now point to at least one success story: Threads, which has grown to 500 million monthly active users. Zuckerberg has said he expects Threads to become the company’s next billion-user app. Threads benefited from Meta’s ability to seed it with users from Instagram and Facebook, but the company also credits LLMs with driving significant gains in content recommendations.
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“We are finding that LLMs are increasingly capable of delivering ranking and recommendations gains,” Meta CFO Susan Li told investors. “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 that could help scale new apps as they launch.
What comes next
Investors on the call focused more on Meta’s AI spending and enterprise ambitions than on the new consumer apps. But Zuckerberg suggested the wait for new products would be short, saying the “new consumer products” were “releasing soon.” The company’s ability to rapidly prototype and iterate using AI tools could finally break its long streak of standalone app failures — though the competitive market remains crowded, with TikTok, Snapchat, and others vying for user attention.
For now, Meta is betting that faster development cycles and smarter recommendation engines will give it an edge in launching the next generation of social apps. Whether users will embrace them remains an open question, but the company now has a clearer path to finding out.
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