Meta is leveraging artificial intelligence to rapidly accelerate its product development cycle, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirming that a wave of new standalone applications is currently in the works. During the company’s second-quarter earnings call this week, Zuckerberg highlighted recent releases—including dedicated apps for Marketplace sellers and Facebook Groups, a gaming platform, a new Instagram photo tool, and an AI-driven bedtime story experiment—as a preview of the company’s AI-fueled strategy.
From Past Failures to AI-Powered Velocity
Meta has spent years attempting to launch standalone social apps to complement its core platforms, often with limited success. The company now asserts that large language models (LLMs) are the missing link, enabling software to be shipped significantly faster and allowing teams to test novel concepts with unprecedented speed.
“I’m excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development,” Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday. “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.
“AI is improving our core business; it’s making our apps more relevant and delivering better results for businesses. We’re starting to deliver more novel products, and we’ll have a lot more there soon as well,” Zuckerberg said.
A History of Experimental Incubators
This is not Meta’s first attempt at rapid experimentation. In its early years, the company operated an internal incubator called Creative Labs, which aimed to pioneer new social concepts. That initiative produced several apps, including Slingshot, Rooms, Paper, Moments, and Riff. However, by 2015, these experiments were shuttered after the company struggled to capture a sustainable user base.
In the early 2020s, Meta tried again via its NPE (New Product Experimentation) Team. This group tested a wide variety of concepts, such as 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, the Cameo competitor Super, couples app Tuned, and the music app BARS. Like their predecessors, none of these projects achieved breakout success, eventually leading to their discontinuation.
The Threads Model and AI Scaling
Meta now points to Threads as a clear success story for its current strategy. Boasting 500 million monthly active users, Zuckerberg envisions Threads eventually becoming the company’s next billion-user application. The strategy for Threads involved leveraging Meta’s massive existing user base to seed the app, followed by aggressive promotion across Facebook and Instagram.
Beyond marketing, LLMs have played a critical role in Threads’ growth. Meta executives noted “significant gains” stemming from AI-powered content recommendations. CFO Susan Li explained to investors that LLMs are increasingly capable of delivering ranking improvements by understanding content context and generating superior training data.
“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 stated.
The Future of Meta’s Ecosystem
Li added that Meta achieved a significant milestone earlier this year: every Reel and Feed post on Instagram is now automatically processed through an LLM to analyze topic and tone, directly enhancing recommendation accuracy. The company is also currently developing LLM-native recommendation systems, which are expected to help scale new applications more effectively as they launch.
While investors focused primarily on AI infrastructure spending and enterprise ambitions during the call, Zuckerberg emphasized that the public will not have to wait long for the next wave of releases, promising that new consumer products are “releasing soon.”
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