Meta Says AI Speeds Up App Development – New Products Coming Soon

Meta is leveraging artificial intelligence to accelerate the development of new applications, with more products on the horizon. During this week's second-quarter earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has recently launched several apps, including Instagram Instants, Forum (a standalone Groups app), and Seller (a standalone Marketplace app). These releases were made possible by large language models (LLMs), which allow for faster testing of new ideas. Zuckerberg emphasized that AI is boosting product development speed and that the company plans to build more ideas and use its recommendation systems to scale them.

Meta has a history of attempting to launch standalone social apps, with most failing to gain traction. Previous efforts like Slingshot, Rooms, Moments, and later experiments by the NPE Team (including Bump, Aux, and Spark) were all shut down. Now, Meta points to Threads as a success story, where AI contributed to reaching 500 million monthly active users. Zuckerberg believes Threads could eventually become the company's next billion-user app.

Chief Financial Officer Susan Li noted that LLMs are driving significant gains in ranking and recommendation systems. For instance, every Instagram Reel and feed post is now automatically processed through an LLM to analyze topic and tone. Meta is also developing LLM-native recommendation systems that could help scale new apps more effectively.

During the call, investors focused more on AI spending and Meta's enterprise ambitions rather than the new apps. Zuckerberg hinted that the new consumer products would be released soon, suggesting users won't have to wait long.