Meta Platforms Inc. shares slipped in early Friday trading after a report indicated the company’s latest foundational AI model, code-named Avocado, has not matched the performance of competing systems developed by other AI firms. By 06:11 ET, the stock was down roughly 1% in premarket activity.
The report said Avocado underperformed models from several competitors in Meta’s internal assessments. People familiar with the testing told the publication that Avocado lagged peers on tasks tied to reasoning, coding and writing. Those evaluations contrasted the new model with both Meta’s previous systems and competing releases from other companies.
Within internal comparisons, Avocado surpassed Meta’s earlier models and outperformed Google’s Gemini 2.5, which was released in March. However, the model did not reach parity with Gemini 3.0, which became available in November, according to the same account. That performance gap has led Meta to push out the planned public launch.
Meta had targeted a public release of Avocado in mid-March after completing its pre-training phase late last year and beginning post-training work in January. The company has now delayed that timeline; the launch is expected no earlier than May, per the report. In the interim, leaders inside Meta’s AI division have discussed the possibility of temporarily licensing Google’s Gemini models to support some AI products, though no final decisions have been announced.
The shift comes as Meta accelerates investment in artificial intelligence. The company increased spending following the underperformance of its earlier model, Llama 4, which failed to meet expectations last year. In June, Meta invested $14.3 billion in the start-up Scale AI and appointed Scale’s chief executive, Alexandr Wang, as Meta’s chief AI officer. Wang has since helped organize a new internal research unit called TBD Lab.
TBD Lab has been focused on two main systems: Avocado and Mango, the latter described as an image and video generation model. The group finished Avocado’s pre-training phase at the end of last year and moved into post-training in January. So far, TBD Lab has released one product, Vibes, an AI video application that has been compared to OpenAI’s product Sora in terms of its functionality.
The internal debate at Meta has extended beyond timing to the model’s distribution model. Executives have weighed whether Avocado should be released as open-source or kept closed. Historically, Meta has supported open-source releases, but both Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang have recently shown a preference for keeping the new model closed, according to the reporting.
The TBD Lab is reported to employ around 100 people and continues to hire, even as some researchers have exited the group ahead of the planned release of Avocado. The company’s leadership is balancing the product-development timetable, staffing changes and strategic choices about licensing and openness while managing expectations for the next-generation model.
Context on corporate strategy
Mark Zuckerberg has previously stated that Meta’s next generation of AI models would "push the frontier in the next year or so" as the company increases spending to remain competitive in the evolving AI field. The reported delay and internal assessments of Avocado’s comparative performance are shaping the near-term rollout plan for the new model.