Meta is making 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-form videos, and giving it its own home outside of the broader Meta AI app. The move, first reported by TechCrunch, reflects Meta’s belief that AI-created video content may be compelling enough to warrant its own spot on your phone.
Originally launched in September 2025 as part of the Meta AI experience, Vibes allows people to use AI tools to create or remix short vertical clips and then browse a feed completely populated with synthetic videos. Instead of watching people film themselves, every piece of content you come across in Vibes is created, or at least significantly shaped, by AI. This feed has gained so much traction that Meta now wants to see the concept implemented as a separate app with a more focused environment for video creation and discovery.
What Meta expects from the standalone Vibes app
Separating Vibes into its own application could serve several purposes. For one thing, it gives Meta a cleaner, single-purpose platform that’s easier to build than trying to turn the AI-generated video experience into a multi-purpose AI assistant. Meta says users are increasingly embracing the format and are creating, discovering and sharing AI-generated clips with friends at an ever-increasing pace. To be fair, however, the company has not yet announced exact usage figures.
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 combines social feeds with AI content creation tools. By giving Vibes its own identity, it can experiment with features specifically tailored to video creation, detection algorithms, and perhaps 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 its launch modest so far, but early interest suggests the company sees a future where AI-based media is not just a side project but a core creative format. It remains to be seen whether users will accept a world where every scroll represents an algorithm’s idea of entertainment rather than someone’s real clip.
