Meta is making significant progress in the AI model race, its superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang told employees today.
In an internal town hall, Wang said that Meta's upcoming AI model — which is codenamed Watermelon — has caught up with OpenAI's flagship GPT-5.5 model, he said, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Wang cited the achievement based on closely followed AI model benchmarks. It's not clear which benchmarks Wang cited.
"Watermelon, our next model after Avocado, is currently in training," Wang said in the town hall, according to a person familiar with the matter. "Watermelon uses an order of magnitude more compute than Avocado," he added, referring to Meta's internal codename for Muse Spark, the first in a family of models that the company released in April.
Wang alluded to that progress publicly, too. In a post on X on Thursday, he said an update to the current model Muse Spark is coming soon, with major gains in coding and agentic capabilities aimed at closing the gap with rival models. Asked by a user when Meta would have a coding model on par with Anthropic's Claude Opus, Wang replied that it would be "pretty soon," adding that users would like what the company has "cooking."
Meta's AI ambitions have long hinged on a simple goal: closing the gap with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Despite a massive investment in chips, data centers, and talent, the company has struggled to convince developers and customers that its models belong at the industry's leading edge.
If Wang's assessment is accurate, it would mark the clearest sign yet that Meta's investment and Zuckerberg's aggressive talent blitz are beginning to pay off, even as the race continues to move at a rapid pace.
GPT 5.5 is a powerful AI model that OpenAI released in April of this year. OpenAI then debuted its most powerful model yet, GPT 5.6, late last month, but hasn't released it generally yet, based on the US government's requests.
Meta declined to comment. OpenAI didn't respond to a request for comment.
In April, Meta released the first in a series of models called Muse Spark, which performed well on benchmarks but did not match or exceed OpenAI or other labs such as Anthropic.
Zuckerberg is ferociously pushing for Meta to get ahead in the AI race. He appointed Wang last year to head this effort, renaming the company's AI division to Meta Superintelligence Labs.
At Meta, Wang oversees a team of elite AI researchers known as TBD, along with other AI efforts, such as a recent hardware push. Meta has offered top AI talent hundreds of millions of dollars each to join, Business Insider previously reported.
That talent push comes as Meta ramps up spending on infrastructure. The company told investors this year that it expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion this year on chips, data centers, and other infrastructure, up from an earlier forecast of $115 billion to $135 billion, citing rising component costs and additional data center spending.
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Charles Rollet is BI's tech correspondent in San Francisco. Prior to joining BI, Charles worked at TechCrunch covering startups and VC. Charles is based in the Bay Area, where he enjoys hiking with his dogs. You can contact Charles securely on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811.
Pranav Dixit is the Meta Correspondent at Business Insider based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes about Meta’s products, policies, and internal workings while examining how the company’s decisions shape how billions of people connect and communicate.Previously, Pranav was the India-based technology correspondent for BuzzFeed News, covering the impact of Silicon Valley’s largest companies on the culture, society, and politics of more than a billion people in South Asia. He has also been a senior news editor at Engadget and ran technology coverage at the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest national newspapers.Pranav’s reporting has shed light on the human consequences of Big Tech’s quest for growth in emerging markets, and sparked widespread conversations about the impact of American technology companies on the Global South. In 2019, he won Syracuse University’s Mirror Award for a boots-on-the-ground feature about how WhatsApp misinformation sparked gruesome lynchings in rural India. He has also reported from Kashmir, a volatile geopolitical hotspot, documenting the world’s longest-running internet shutdown.His work has been widely cited by major national and international publications, and he has been featured on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and podcasts such as Vox Media’s Land of the Giants to discuss his work. He has also spoken in journalism classes including at UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vox, Time, The Information, and Al Jazeera.Pranav moved to the United States in 2021 from New Delhi, India, to be a fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where he studied the evolution of the American tech press and ways newsrooms around the world can cover technology and society more effectively.Got a tip about Meta or anything else in Silicon Valley? Contact Pranav via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1408-905-9124), or email him at [email protected] or [email protected]. You can also reach him on WhatsApp at +857-753-3949 or DM him on X (@PranavDixit) or BlueSky (@pranavdixit.bsky.social).Pranav keeps sources anonymous. Please use a non-work device to reach out.Expertise: Meta, Facebook, WhatsApp, Llama, AI, Threads, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, social media, platforms, immigration
