Meta is throwing serious computational firepower at its next frontier AI model. Watermelon, the company’s upcoming proprietary system, reportedly uses an order of magnitude more compute than its predecessor Avocado, according to Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang.
Meta had been developing Avocado, a text-focused AI model, with plans to ship it by the end of 2025. Those plans didn’t survive contact with reality. Avocado fell behind Google’s Gemini 3.0, which launched in November 2025, in critical areas like reasoning and coding. The result: Meta pushed Avocado’s release to at least May 2026.
Wang has reportedly claimed that Watermelon has caught up to OpenAI’s improved GPT-5.5. The ten-times compute increase tells you how Meta plans to get there. Meta’s model pipeline doesn’t stop there either. The company also has a model codenamed Mango in development, designed specifically for image and video generation.
In June 2025, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, the data infrastructure company founded by Wang. That investment came alongside Wang’s appointment as Meta’s chief AI officer. The shift marks a notable departure from Meta’s previously open-source Llama model series toward closed, proprietary systems like Avocado and Watermelon.
