Meta postpones 'Avocado' flagship model launch past Q1 2026
Internal testing reportedly placed the model's reasoning, coding and writing between Google's Gemini 2.5 and Gemini 3, prompting Meta to push the launch to May 2026 or later.
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Meta pushed back the launch of “Avocado,” its next flagship model, from a planned March 2026 debut to May at the earliest, after internal testing found it lagging systems from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on reasoning, coding and writing. Reports citing internal assessments placed Avocado’s performance somewhere between Google’s Gemini 2.5 and the newer Gemini 3.
Avocado marks Meta’s shift away from Llama, the open-weight line that built its standing among developers, toward a closed model developed under Alexandr Wang’s Superintelligence Labs. It is not Meta’s first flagship stumble: Llama 4 was pushed back after missing internal benchmarks, and a subsequent large model, Behemoth, was delayed over engineering problems.
Reports on the slip said Meta was weighing a stopgap — temporarily licensing a rival’s model for some products while Avocado’s development continued — and already had a successor, “Watermelon,” in planning. Set against Meta’s capital-spending guidance of $115–135 billion for 2026 in pursuit of “superintelligence,” the delay illustrated the gap between the scale of the company’s AI investment and its research organisation’s pace.