Meta’s $META ( ▲ 0.32% ) AI ambitions have had a turbulent 2025. The company spent the year talking up Llama 4, an open-source successor that never fully materialized, leaving Meta trailing rivals that shipped on schedule.
In an effort to catch up, Mark Zuckerberg launched an aggressive talent grab for his new Meta Superintelligence Labs, handing out blockbuster compensation packages to build a team capable of competing at the frontier. The result was a fast-growing unit inside a corporate structure that was not ready for it.
According to CNBC, that rapid expansion has created internal tension. The new group is developing a next-generation model called “Avocado,” and despite Zuckerberg’s public insistence on open-source AI, Avocado may end up being a closed-source system.
The original goal was to ship Avocado before the end of 2025. The timeline has now slipped into the first quarter of 2026 as Meta tries to sort out strategy, structure, and how open it really wants its AI future to be.