Meta Delayed Its Avocado AI Model — Here’s Where the Project Stands Now

Meta's most-anticipated AI model missed its March launch window. Here is what happened, why, and what the company is doing about it.

Mar 13, 2026

by Damilare Odedina

Meta has pushed back the release of its next foundational AI model, code-named Avocado, from this month to at least May 2026, the New York Times reported Thursday, March 12, citing three people with knowledge of the matter.

The delay follows internal tests in which Avocado fell short of the performance benchmarks set by leading AI models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic across reasoning, coding, and writing tasks, according to the Times report.

The model did outperform Meta's previous AI model and cleared the bar set by Google's Gemini 2.5, which launched in March 2025. But it did not reach the level of Google's Gemini 3.0, released in November 2025, placing Avocado between two generations of Google's most advanced models on Meta's internal evaluations.

Meta spokesman Dave Arnold responded to the Times in a statement saying, "our next model will be good, but more importantly, show the rapid trajectory we're on, and then we'll steadily push the frontier over the course of the year as we continue to release new models. We're excited for people to see what we've been cooking very soon."