Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken charge of the company's AI commercialization roadmap. The new generation large model, internally codenamed "Avocado," is confirmed to be released in spring 2026 in a closed-source format, offering only API and hosted services, without open weights.

Meta TBD Lab integrates third-party open-source achievements such as Google's Gemma, OpenAI's gpt-oss, and Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) for pre-training and alignment of Avocado, aiming for frontier-level performance. The company recently signed a $5 billion order with NVIDIA for H100 chips, specifically for Avocado training clusters.

The closed-source strategy means Meta will remove the "open-source advocate" label and shift toward API + advertising + cloud revenue: the Meta AI API is planned to switch to the Avocado foundation, AI assistants embedded in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp will be upgraded comprehensively, and capabilities will be delivered to developers through AWS, Azure, and other hosting nodes.

Industry analysts believe that if Avocado is launched on schedule, it will become a new competitor at the same level but with a different business model, backed by 300 million monthly active users. The developer community and regulators have already shown interest in its transparency and audit progress. Meta will hold a global launch event in Q1 2026, where Zuckerberg will personally demonstrate multimodal capabilities and advertising scenarios. AIbase will continue to track its technical details and compliance developments.