Meta says AI is making it easier to build new apps — and more are coming

Meta is using AI to quickly launch apps, and more are on the way. During this week’s second-quarter earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social giant has new apps in the works, following a recent spate of other launches that included an app for Marketplace sellers , one for Facebook Groups , a vibe-coded gaming app , a new photos app from Instagram , and an experiment involving AI bedtime stories.

Meta has spent years trying and failing to produce new, standalone social apps to complement its core platforms. Now, the company says that large language models (LLMs) make it possible to ship software faster, allowing it to test new ideas at a quicker pace.

“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 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,” he said.

“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.

Meta has been down this road before. In its earlier days, Meta (then known as Facebook) ran an internal incubator called Creative Labs, which aimed to test new social concepts.

That effort produced a handful of launches: the photo-sharing app Slingshot , an anonymous chat app Rooms, a Flipboard competitor called Paper , the Moments photo-sharing app, and a collaborative video app known as Riff. Those experiments came to an end in 2015 , and the apps were eventually all shuttered, as the company struggled to find an audience for its efforts.

In the early 2020s, Meta tried again, this time with an internal R&D group, NPE Team , which tested apps that included 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 , music app BARS , and others.

Again, none became a breakout success, and the apps were shut down.

Now Meta can point to at least one example of how AI is helping new apps scale. It has finally delivered a modest hit with Threads, which now has 500 million monthly active users . Zuckerberg likes to say Threads will one day become the company’s next billion-user app.