Meta AI chief says ‘Watermelon’ model has caught up to GPT-5.5
Meta AI chief says ‘Watermelon’ model has caught up to GPT-5.5
Publish Date: 2026-07-03 12:39:00
Source Domain: americanbazaaronline.com
Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, said the company has made significant progress in the race to build advanced artificial intelligence models. According to a Business Insider report, Wang told employees during an internal town hall that Meta’s upcoming AI model, codenamed “Watermelon,” has caught up with OpenAI’s flagship GPT-5.5 model.
“Watermelon, our next model after Avocado, is currently in training,” Wang said in the town hall, according to a person familiar with the matter. “Watermelon uses an order of magnitude more compute than Avocado,” he added, referring to Meta’s internal codename for Muse Spark, the first in a family of models that the company released in April.
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On Thursday, Wang also said in a post on X that an update to Meta’s current AI model Muse Spark will be released soon, bringing significant improvements in coding and agentic capabilities to help close the gap with rival models. Responding to a question about when Meta would have a coding model comparable to Anthropic’s Claude Opus, Wang said the upcoming Muse Spark update is designed to narrow that gap.
While Meta had invested massively in chips, data centers and talent, the company is yet to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic. If Wang’s assessment is correct, it might mark the clearest sign yet that Meta’s investment is paying off.
According to Reuters, CEO Mark Zuckerberg struck a more cautious tone during the town hall. Reuters reported that Wang oversees Meta’s elite AI research team, known as TBD, as well as other artificial intelligence initiatives, including the company’s recent hardware push.
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Zuckerberg also addressed Meta’s recent layoffs in an interview with Reuters, saying they were not as “clean” as they should have been. He…
