Frontier AI

Mark Zuckerberg just played his most expensive hand yet. Meta unveiled Muse Spark, the first AI model from its Superintelligence Labs — the division built on a $14.3 billion Scale AI investment and a talent raid that cost hundreds of millions in individual engineer packages. After more than a year in the wilderness following the embarrassing Llama 4 launch, Meta says it’s back. But here’s the twist nobody expected: the company that championed open-source AI just went proprietary. ...

There’s a certain poetry in naming your flagship AI model after a fruit famous for going from “not ripe” to “completely rotten” in about six hours. Meta’s next-generation model, codenamed Avocado, was supposed to prove that $135 billion in annual AI spending could buy a seat at the frontier table. Instead, it’s become the most expensive guacamole in history — and the fallout is reshaping the entire tech industry. The Avocado Debacle The New York Times reported last week that Meta has delayed Avocado’s release from March to at least May. The reason: internal testing revealed the model trails leading systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic in logical reasoning, programming, and writing. ...