{"id":551585,"date":"2026-07-30T16:56:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/551585\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T16:56:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:56:08","slug":"meta-says-ai-is-making-it-easier-to-build-new-apps-and-more-are-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/551585\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta says AI is making it easier to build new apps \u2014 and more are coming"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meta is using AI to quickly launch apps, and more are on the way. During this week\u2019s 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\u00a0app for Marketplace sellers<\/a>,\u00a0one for Facebook Groups<\/a>, a vibe-coded\u00a0gaming app<\/a>, a newphotos app from Instagram<\/a>, and an\u00a0experiment<\/a> involving AI bedtime stories.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m\u2026excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development,\u201d Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday\u2019s call. \u201cEarlier 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is improving our core business; it\u2019s making our apps more relevant and delivering better results for businesses. We\u2019re starting to deliver more novel products, and we\u2019ll have a lot more there soon as well,\u201d Zuckerberg said.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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

In the early 2020s, Meta tried again, this time with an internal R&D group, NPE Team<\/a>, which tested apps that included the chat app Bump, social music app Aux, task app Move<\/a>, dating app Spark<\/a>, calling app CatchUp<\/a>, zine maker E.gg,<\/a> events app Venue<\/a>, creator Q&A app Hotline<\/a>, Cameo competitor Super<\/a>, couples app Tuned<\/a>, music app BARS<\/a>, and others.<\/p>\n

Again, none became a breakout success, and the apps were shut down.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Zuckerberg likes to say Threads will one day become the company\u2019s next billion-user app.<\/p>\n

With Threads, Meta learned to heavily lean on its existing user base<\/a> to help initially seed the app with people, then continued to heavily promote it across its existing platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. But LLMs are another key factor in Threads\u2019 growth, as the company said it sees \u201csignificant gains\u201d from its AI-powered content recommendations.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are finding that LLMs are increasingly capable of delivering ranking and recommendations gains,\u201d Meta\u2019s CFO Susan Li told investors on the call. \u201cFirst, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Li added that earlier this year, Meta reached a milestone: every Reel and Feed post on Instagram is now automatically processed through an LLM and analyzed for topic and tone, which helps improve recommendations.<\/p>\n

The company is also developing LLM-native recommendation systems, which could help it to better scale new apps as they arrive.<\/p>\n

Investors didn\u2019t follow up with company executives to ask more questions about the new apps Meta has in the works, as they were more concerned with AI spending and Meta\u2019s growing enterprise ambitions. However, Zuckerberg suggested that people won\u2019t have long to wait to see what\u2019s next, saying the \u201cnew consumer products\u201d were \u201creleasing soon.\u201d <\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta is using AI to quickly launch apps, and more are on the way. During this week\u2019s second-quarter…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,6015,363,364,898,111,139,69,1414,145],"class_list":["post-551585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-apps","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-meta","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-social-media","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}