Meta is delaying plans to launch a new artificial intelligence (AI) platform model after internal tests show performance has not met expectations compared to top competitors in the technology industry.
Meta's new AI model codenamed Avocado has been developed for months. However, in internal tests of reasoning, programming and writing content, this system has not yet achieved the performance equivalent to advanced AI models from competitors such as Google, OpenAI or Anthropic.
Previously, Meta planned to release Avocado in March. But due to the evaluation results not meeting expectations, the company decided to postpone the launch date to at least May to continue improving performance.
Although Avocado still shows progress compared to Meta's previous AI models and even works better than some older Google systems such as Gemini 2.5 launched in March. However, Avocado's performance is said to still not be comparable to Gemini 3.0, Google's newer version.
Faced with this situation, Meta's leadership even discussed the possibility of temporarily licensing Gemini technology to support the company's AI products, although no official decision has been made.
Avocado's performance is being closely monitored in the context of increasingly fierce AI development competition.
Currently, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are considered leading companies in the field of AI modeling platforms, core technologies behind chatbots, programming tools, image and video creation systems using artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, Meta is making a big bet on AI as a strategic pillar. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has invested billions of USD to attract leading AI researchers and build a data center system to serve this technology.
According to the plan, Meta could spend up to $135 billion this year, nearly double the $72 billion of the previous year, to develop infrastructure for large-scale AI models.
This ambition became even clearer after Meta's Llama 4 model launched last year did not meet expectations. To strengthen research capabilities, the company invested $14.3 billion in the startup Scale AI and appointed young founder Alexandr Wang as the new AI director.
Wang then established an internal research lab called TBD Lab (abbreviated from “to be determined”), focusing on developing two new AI models inspired by fruit, Avocado and Mango, in which Mango aims to create images and videos using AI.
According to the development roadmap, Avocado completed the pre-training phase at the end of last year and entered the post-training phase from January this year.
Although the launch plan was delayed, Meta still expressed its determination to pursue long-term goals. In a meeting with investors earlier this year, Zuckerberg said he expected the company's new AI models to continue to progress rapidly and could open a new technology era.
Currently, the only product from Meta's new AI division is Vibes, an application that creates videos using artificial intelligence similar to Sora of OpenAI.
