Meta is leveraging artificial intelligence to accelerate app development, with several new applications already in the pipeline. During this week’s second-quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the social media giant has additional apps under development, following a recent wave of launches that included an app for Marketplace vendors, one for Facebook Groups, a vibe-coded gaming app, a new photos app from Instagram, and an experiment centered on AI-generated bedtime stories.

For years, Meta has attempted—and often failed—to create standalone social apps that complement its core platforms. Now, the company asserts that large language models (LLMs) enable faster software deployment, allowing it to test new concepts more rapidly. “I’m…excited about how AI is helping our teams speed up product development,” Zuckerberg told investors during Wednesday’s call. “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,” he explained. “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,” Zuckerberg added.

This isn’t Meta’s first foray into experimental app development. In its earlier days, the company—then known as Facebook—operated an internal incubator called Creative Labs, designed to test new social concepts. That initiative produced several launches: the photo-sharing app Slingshot, an anonymous chat app Rooms, a Flipboard rival named Paper, the Moments photo-sharing app, and a collaborative video app called Riff. However, those experiments concluded in 2015, and all the apps were eventually shut down as the company struggled to attract users.

In the early 2020s, Meta tried again with an internal R&D group, NPE Team, which tested apps such as the chat app Bump, social music app Aux, task app Move, dating app Spark, calling app CatchUp, zine maker E.gg, events app Venue, creator Q&A app Hotline, Cameo competitor Super, couples app Tuned, music app BARS, and others. Once more, none achieved breakout success, and the apps were discontinued.

Now, Meta can point to at least one example of how AI is helping new apps gain traction. The company has finally found a modest hit with Threads, which now boasts 500 million monthly active users. Zuckerberg often suggests that Threads will eventually become the company’s next billion-user app. With Threads, Meta learned to heavily rely on its existing user base to initially populate the app, then continued to aggressively promote it across its established platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. But LLMs are another critical factor in Threads’ growth, as the company reports “significant gains” from its AI-powered content recommendations.

“We are finding that LLMs are increasingly capable of delivering ranking and recommendations gains,” Meta’s CFO Susan Li told investors during the call. “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 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. The company is also developing LLM-native recommendation systems, which could help it better scale new apps as they launch.

Investors did not press company executives for more details about the new apps in development, as their focus was on AI spending and Meta’s growing enterprise ambitions. However, Zuckerberg hinted that people won’t have to wait long to see what’s next, stating that the “new consumer products” are “releasing soon.”