Meta is leveraging artificial intelligence to accelerate the development and release of new applications, with additional launches anticipated. During the recent second-quarter earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the social media titan has several new apps under development, building on a series of recent introductions. These have included a dedicated app for Marketplace sellers, another for Facebook Groups, a gaming app categorized by "vibe," a novel photos app from Instagram, and an experimental project centered on AI-generated bedtime stories.
Historically, Meta has faced challenges in successfully launching new, independent social applications designed to augment its primary platforms. However, the company now asserts that the advent of large language models (LLMs) significantly streamlines the software development process, thereby enabling a more rapid iterative approach to testing novel concepts.
"I’m…excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development," Zuckerberg conveyed to investors during Wednesday's call. He elaborated, "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."
Zuckerberg further emphasized, “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.”
This strategic direction is not unprecedented for Meta. In its nascent stages, the company, then operating as Facebook, established an internal incubator named Creative Labs, specifically designed to explore and test innovative social concepts.
This initiative resulted in several launches, including the photo-sharing application Slingshot, the anonymous chat app Rooms, a Flipboard competitor named Paper, the Moments photo-sharing app, and the collaborative video app Riff. However, these experimental ventures concluded in 2015, with all associated applications ultimately being discontinued due to the company's inability to cultivate a substantial user base for them.
Undeterred, Meta made another attempt in the early 2020s, this time through an internal research and development division called NPE Team. This team explored a wide array of applications, such as the chat app Bump, the social music app Aux, the task management app Move, the dating app Spark, the calling app CatchUp, the zine creator E.gg, the events app Venue, the creator Q&A app Hotline, the Cameo competitor Super, the couples app Tuned, and the music app BARS, among others.
Once more, none of these offerings achieved significant widespread adoption, leading to their eventual discontinuation.
Currently, Meta can highlight at least one instance where AI has demonstrably aided the scaling of a new application. Threads has emerged as a considerable success, boasting 500 million monthly active users. Zuckerberg has expressed confidence that Threads is poised to become the company's next application to reach a billion users.
Through Threads, Meta gained valuable insights into leveraging its extensive existing user base to initially populate the app, subsequently promoting it vigorously across its established platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Crucially, large language models (LLMs) are identified as another significant contributor to Threads' growth, with the company reporting “significant gains” derived from its AI-powered content recommendation systems.
Meta's CFO, Susan Li, informed investors during the call, “We are finding that LLMs are increasingly capable of delivering ranking and recommendations gains.” She elaborated on their dual impact: “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 further disclosed a significant milestone achieved earlier this year: every Reel and Feed post on Instagram now undergoes automatic processing through an LLM, where it is analyzed for topic and tone, thereby enhancing recommendation accuracy.
Furthermore, Meta is actively developing recommendation systems that are natively built on LLMs, a strategy anticipated to facilitate the more effective scaling of new applications upon their introduction.
Interestingly, investors did not press company executives for further details regarding Meta's upcoming applications, their primary focus instead being on AI expenditure and the company's expanding enterprise aspirations. Nevertheless, Zuckerberg indicated that the public would not have to wait long for new developments, confirming that "new consumer products" were "releasing soon."
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