Meta Delays Rollout of New A.I. Model After Performance Concerns

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said in July that his company’s new artificial intelligence models would “push the frontier in the next year or so.”

Now Mr. Zuckerberg — who has invested billions in the A.I. race — appears increasingly unlikely to hit that deadline, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

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 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.

How Meta’s A.I. model performs is being closely watched in the competition over the fast-evolving technology. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are widely regarded as ahead in foundational A.I. models, which are the basis for developing new chatbots, video generators, coding tools and other products. Being at the forefront of A.I. development also helps companies recruit technologists and keep up a stream of experimentation.

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Alex Chen