Meta is taking a surprising turn in the world of social apps: it’s testing a standalone version of Vibes, a feature that lets users create and discover AI-generated short videos, and giving it its own dedicated home outside the broader Meta AI app. The move, first reported by TechCrunch, reflects Meta’s belief that AI-created video content might be compelling enough to warrant its own space on your phone.
Originally launched in September 2025 inside the Meta AI experience, Vibes lets people generate or remix short vertical clips using AI tools, then browse a feed populated entirely by synthetic videos. Instead of watching humans film themselves, every piece of content you encounter in Vibes is made, or at least significantly shaped, by AI. That feed has gained enough traction that Meta now wants to see how the concept plays out as a separate app with a more focused environment for video creation and discovery.
What Meta wants from the standalone Vibes app
Breaking Vibes out into its own application could serve multiple purposes. For one, it gives Meta a cleaner, single-purpose platform that’s easier to build around than trying to shoehorn the AI-generated video experience into a multipurpose AI assistant. Meta says that users are increasingly leaning into the format, creating, discovering, and sharing AI-generated clips with friends at a growing rate. Though, to be fair, the company hasn’t shared exact usage numbers yet.
The standalone app’s focus on synthetic vertical video puts it in more direct competition with other emerging AI video platforms like OpenAI’s Sora, which also blends social feeds with AI content creation tools. By giving Vibes its own identity, Meta can experiment with features tailored specifically to video creation, discovery algorithms, and possibly even monetization paths like freemium subscriptions that unlock more advanced creation tools in the future.
Meta is currently testing Vibes in select markets and has kept the rollout modest so far, but early interest suggests the company sees a future where AI-crafted media isn’t just a side project, but a core creative format. Whether users will embrace a world where every scroll is an algorithm’s idea of entertainment, instead of someone’s real-life clip, remains to be seen.
