TECHNOMALIST
Meta is turning to artificial intelligence to speed up app development, a strategic shift that CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted during the company’s latest earnings call. The social media giant has recently shipped a handful of standalone applications, including Instagram Instants, a dedicated Facebook Groups client called Forum, and a Marketplace app for sellers, alongside experiments like a vibe-coded gaming app and AI-generated bedtime stories.
Zuckerberg framed the acceleration as a direct result of AI tools improving engineering velocity. “I’m excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development,” he told investors. “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 that more novel consumer products are “releasing soon.”
This is not the company’s first attempt to build a portfolio of standalone social apps. Earlier efforts, such as the Creative Labs incubator in the mid-2010s, produced apps like Slingshot, Paper, and Riff, all of which were eventually shut down after failing to gain traction. A second wave, run by the NPE Team in the early 2020s, similarly fizzled, with experiments ranging from dating app Spark to music app Aux discontinued. Those repeated failures have made the current AI-driven approach a notable pivot.
Threads, Meta’s text-based conversation app, stands as a counterexample. It has reached 500 million monthly active users, and Zuckerberg has repeatedly claimed it is on track to become the company’s next billion-user service. The app’s growth has been helped by aggressive cross-promotion across Facebook and Instagram, but executives now credit AI-powered content recommendations for significant gains.
Chief Financial Officer Susan Li explained on the call that large language models are being used to make existing ranking systems smarter by better understanding content and generating improved training data. Additionally, LLM-based agents assist engineering teams by evaluating content quality, spotting trends, and testing ranking changes. Li disclosed that, as of earlier this year, every Reels and Feed post on Instagram is automatically processed through an LLM to analyze topic and tone, a milestone aimed at boosting recommendation accuracy.
Meta is also developing LLM-native recommendation systems, which Li said could help the company scale new apps more effectively as they launch. The remark suggests the company views AI not just as a tool for internal development speed but as a core component of future app growth strategies.
Zuckerberg did not specify which new products are in the pipeline, and during the call investors focused primarily on AI infrastructure spending and enterprise ambitions rather than the consumer app roadmap. The company’s recent launches also include a vibe-coded gaming app, a new photos app from Instagram, and an experimental AI bedtime stories feature, as previously reported by TechCrunch.
The external context of high geopolitical risk, including war-related uncertainties, casts a shadow over the company’s outlook, though executives did not directly address such factors on the call. The high-risk environment underscores the broader challenges Meta faces despite its AI-driven product cadence.
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