Meta's AI-fueled app factory is back, and Zuckerberg says more are 'releasing soon'

Meta is dusting off an old playbook — launching standalone apps — but with a new engine under the hood. After years of failed experiments from shuttered incubators like Creative Labs and the NPE Team, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday’s Q2 earnings call that large language models are fundamentally changing the company’s speed and success rate.

“I’m…excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development,” Zuckerberg said. He pointed to a recent flurry of launches: Instagram Instants, Forum (a standalone Groups app), and Seller (a standalone Marketplace app). The process is now a rapid-fire testbed. “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.

The difference this time isn’t just faster coding. It’s distribution. Threads is the proof-of-concept, having quietly hit 500 million monthly active users. Meta heavily seeded that app through Instagram and Facebook, but CFO Susan Li noted that LLMs are now doing the heavy lifting on content ranking. She revealed that the company recently hit a milestone where every single Reel and Feed post on Instagram is automatically processed through an LLM to analyze its topic and tone, creating better training data for recommendations. The company is even building LLM-native recommendation systems from scratch.

Meta’s history here is a graveyard of also-rans — Slingshot, Bump, Super, Tuned. This time, the tools are smarter, but the core challenge remains the same: getting people to care about yet another app. The market was too focused on capex and enterprise AI to press for details on what, exactly, is “releasing soon.” But Meta clearly isn’t waiting for permission. It’s shipping.