Meta credits AI for accelerating app development; new launches expected soon

Meta is leaning on artificial intelligence to roll out new applications at a faster pace than in the past, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced during the company's second-quarter earnings call this week. The company recently introduced several standalone apps including a dedicated Marketplace platform for sellers, a Groups-focused social app, and experimental projects like a vibe-coded gaming app and an AI storytelling service.

"I'm excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development," Zuckerberg told investors, indicating that the company intends to launch additional applications in the near term and harness its recommendation systems to grow them at scale.

A long history of failed standalone apps#

Meta's track record with new social applications has been rocky. Under its Creative Labs incubator, the company experimented with projects including Slingshot, Rooms, Paper, and other niche social experiments between 2010 and 2015—none of which found a sustainable audience. A decade later, the NPE Team (Meta's experimental division) repeated this pattern, testing dozens of apps across chat, music, dating, and events categories, with similarly disappointing results. Each initiative was eventually shelved as Meta struggled to build breakout hits outside its core Facebook and Instagram properties.

AI as an accelerant#

Meta executives argue that large language models (LLMs) fundamentally change the equation. By automating key development tasks and improving product recommendations, LLMs allow teams to iterate faster and validate concepts more efficiently. The company's CFO Susan Li highlighted two concrete applications: LLMs make existing recommendation systems more intelligent by understanding content context and generating better training data, while AI agents assist with engineering tasks like quality assessment and trend detection.

Meta pointed to Threads, its Twitter competitor, as evidence of this approach working. The platform recently crossed 500 million monthly active users, growing partly through aggressive cross-promotion on Facebook and Instagram, but also through significant gains in AI-powered content recommendations. Li disclosed that every Instagram Reel and Feed post now runs through an LLM for automatic topic and tone analysis—a capability designed to refine what users see.