Meta’s Avocado Delay Puts $135 Billion AI Bet Under Scrutiny
Meta’s Avocado Delay Puts $135 Billion AI Bet Under Scrutiny
Publish Date: 2026-03-13 12:13:00
Source Domain: www.pymnts.com
Meta delayed the launch of Avocado, its next-generation artificial intelligence model.
The company pushed the release to at least May from a planned debut this month, The New York Times reported Thursday (March 12).
The delay follows internal testing that showed the model trailing leading systems from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic in key areas, including logical reasoning, programming and writing, the report said.
Avocado outperformed Meta’s previous generation models and some earlier competing systems, The Information reported Feb. 4, but it failed to match the performance of Google’s newest Gemini models, per the NYT report.
The gap matters because Avocado was not intended as an incremental upgrade. The model was designed to compete directly with frontier systems from OpenAI and Google and to serve as the centerpiece of Meta’s next phase of AI development.
Internally, the model had been framed as a major leap forward. Meta Superintelligence Labs Product Manager Megan Fu described Avocado in an internal memo as the company’s most capable base model yet and suggested it had the potential to outperform rival systems once additional post-training improvements were applied, per the report from The Information.
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The production version has not yet met that expectation.
The delay also follows a difficult year for Meta’s AI efforts. The company’s Llama 4 release last year failed to generate strong developer enthusiasm, prompting an internal restructuring across parts of the AI organization, The Information reported Aug. 15.
Avocado had been positioned internally as the reset.
The Gemini Question and What It Signals
The more revealing development may be what Meta is considering in the interim.
The company’s leadership discussed temporarily licensing Google’s Gemini technology to power certain Meta products while Avocado is brought up to competitive performance, the NYT reported. No decision has been confirmed.
Meta…
