Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times:
Meta’s new foundational A.I. model, which the company has been
working on for months, has fallen short of the performance of
leading A.I. models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic
on internal tests for reasoning, coding and writing, said the
people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about
confidential matters.The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta’s previous A.I.
model and did better than Google’s Gemini 2.5 model from [last]
March, two of the people said. But it has not performed as
strongly as Gemini 3.0 from November, they said.As a result, Meta has delayed Avocado’s release to at least May
from this month, the people said. They added that the leaders of
Meta’s A.I. division had instead discussed temporarily licensing
Gemini to power the company’s A.I. products, though no decisions
have been reached.
The two facts in the last paragraph don’t square with me. May is only two months away. If they might ship then, why license Gemini? To me, the “we may need to pay Google to license Gemini” scenario is a sign that Avocado might be a bust and they might be a year or longer away from their own competitive model.
Mr. Zuckerberg, 41, has staked the future of Meta, which owns
Facebook, Instagram and Threads, on being at the cutting edge of
A.I. His company has spent billions hiring top A.I.
researchers and committed $600 billion to building data
centers to power the technology. In January, Meta projected that
it would spend as much as $135 billion this year, nearly
twice the $72 billion it spent last year.
The difference between Meta and Apple might be that Meta is merely a few months away from rolling out its own best-of-breed AI model. But the difference could be that Meta has blown hundreds of billions of dollars pursuing their own frontier models, and Apple has not, and both just license Gemini from Google.
