Meta’s AI app users create 20B images as company eyes content shift

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to significantly expand AI-generated content across the company’s social media platforms during Wednesday’s earnings call. This represents what he describes as a potential third era of social media, following periods dominated first by friends and family content, then by creator content, with AI now poised to add “yet another huge corpus of content” to recommendation systems.

What you should know: Zuckerberg outlined his vision for AI’s role in transforming social media content creation and distribution.
• “Social media has gone through two eras so far,” Zuckerberg explained. “First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all of the Creator content.”
• The company is developing recommendation systems that will “deeply understand” AI-generated posts and “show you the right content,” which Zuckerberg believes will become “increasingly valuable.”
• Meta is already experimenting with dedicated AI social apps beyond just embedding AI tools in existing platforms.

Early results from AI experiments: Meta’s new Vibes app demonstrates significant user engagement with AI-generated content.
• Users have created over 20 billion images within the Vibes app, which delivers a feed of AI-generated videos similar to OpenAI’s Sora.
• Meta CFO Susan Li highlighted these impressive usage numbers during the earnings call.
• “I think that Vibes is an example of a new content type enabled by AI, and I think that there are more opportunities to build many more novel types of content ahead,” Zuckerberg added.

The big picture: This AI content expansion comes as Meta continues to see strong financial performance, with the company reporting $51.24 billion in revenue this quarter, representing a 26% year-over-year increase.
• The company did take a one-time $15.93 billion tax charge associated with President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.
• Meta’s push into AI-generated content positions the company to capitalize on users’ growing comfort with AI-created material across their social feeds.

Why this matters: Meta’s commitment to flooding social feeds with AI content could fundamentally reshape how users consume and interact with social media, potentially accelerating the shift away from human-created posts toward algorithmically generated material that’s designed to maximize engagement.