Meta is using AI to ship new apps faster, and more are on the way. During the second-quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has new apps in the works, following recent launches including an app for Marketplace sellers, one for Facebook Groups, a vibe-coded gaming app, a new photos app from Instagram, and an experiment with AI bedtime stories. Zuckerberg told investors: “AI is helping our teams speed up product development…we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them.”

Meta has a long history of trying and failing to launch standalone social apps. Earlier efforts included Creative Labs (2014–2015), which produced apps like Slingshot, Rooms, Paper, Moments, and Riff, all later shuttered. In the early 2020s, the NPE Team tested apps such as Bump, Aux, Tuned, BARS, and others, none of which became breakout successes. Now, with LLMs, Meta says it can test ideas more quickly and scale them using AI-powered recommendations.

The company points to Threads as a modest success, now at 500 million monthly active users. CFO Susan Li noted that LLMs are delivering “significant gains” in ranking and recommendations. Every Reel and Feed post on Instagram is now automatically processed through an LLM for topic and tone analysis, improving recommendations. Meta is also developing LLM-native recommendation systems to help scale new apps. Zuckerberg says Threads could become Meta’s next billion-user app, with heavy promotion across Facebook and Instagram.

Investors on the call focused more on AI spending and enterprise ambitions than on the new apps. However, Zuckerberg indicated that “new consumer products” are “releasing soon.” The article notes that Meta’s ability to lean on its existing user base and AI-driven recommendations is a key factor in its renewed app strategy.