Meta stated during its Q1 earnings call this Tuesday that artificial intelligence is shortening product development cycles, and the company has already launched several standalone applications, with more new products to follow.
Zuckerberg talks about the pace of new applications
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that AI is helping teams complete product development faster. This year, Meta has launched Instagram Instants, the standalone Facebook Groups app Forum, and a separate app for Marketplace sellers called Seller.
He stated that as the development threshold continues to decrease, launching new apps will become easier. The company plans to continue developing products around more creative ideas and leverage recommendation systems to expand the reach of these apps.
AI is used in both recommendation and engineering processes.
Meta management stated that AI is not only accelerating the rollout of new products but also improving the performance of existing businesses. Zuckerberg indicated that AI makes the content on their apps more relevant and delivers better advertising results for merchants.
Susan Li stated that large language models are increasingly improving ranking and recommendation performance, mainly in two aspects:
- A more accurate understanding of the content theme leads to better training data.
- Participate in content quality assessment, trend identification, and ranking testing.
She also revealed that Meta completed an internal rollout earlier this year: every Reels and Feed post on Instagram will now be automatically processed by a large language model and analyzed by topic and tone to improve recommendations.
In the past, we have tried to incubate new products many times.
Meta is not the first time Facebook has intensively tested new applications. In its early years, Facebook also established an internal incubation department called Creative Labs to try to launch different social products, including the photo app Slingshot, the anonymous chat app Rooms, as well as products such as Paper, Moments, and Riff.
However, these attempts ultimately failed to achieve a widespread user base, and the related applications were subsequently shut down. Meta's renewed emphasis on the pace of new applications indicates that it is attempting to leverage AI to reduce trial-and-error costs and accelerate product launches.
During the conference call, investors focused more on Meta's AI spending and enterprise business expansion, asking fewer questions about the new applications themselves. Zuckerberg stated that new consumer products would be released "soon."
