Pro-Worker AI
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, pro-worker AI. Before that in the headlines, Meta delays its next AI model. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Robots and Pencils, Blitzy, and AIUC. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai-dailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at ai-dailybrief.ai. It appears that Meta has had another setback as their latest frontier model gets delayed. The New York Times reports that Meta's new model, codenamed Avocado, has been delayed until at least May.
We last heard about the model's progress in January when CTO Andrew Bosworth told Reuters it had been delivered for internal testing. He said at the time that the model was, quote, very good, but warned that there's still a lot of work to be done in the reinforcement learning process. More recently, there's been reports that Meta has set up a new applied AI division that reports to Bosworth rather than AI CEO Alexander Wang. Rumors followed that Zuckerberg was done with Wang, although those rumors were strenuously denied. Now the reporting states that Avocado Performance has fallen short of the latest models from rivals, and this month's planned rollout has been delayed. The report mentioned a shortfall in reasoning, coding, and writing from internal benchmarks.
In other words, basically every major category for modern LLMs. Reportedly, the model outperformed Gemini 2.5, but wasn't a match for Gemini 3. Now, part of the issue could be the long development cycle. Meta has been working on this model for almost nine months, and the goalposts of model performance have shifted dramatically during that time. Meta put an optimistic spin on the issue, issuing a statement which said, 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. And yet that doesn't exactly comport with reports that Meta leadership is even considering licensing Gemini to power their products as a stopgap solution.
That said, researchers are said to be excited about the next model after Avocado, codenamed Watermelon. Now, ultimately, I certainly think that making people wait for a model that's actually good is way better than releasing a model that no one is impressed with. But the model battle for Meta remains distinctly uphill. Ethan Mollick summed up a bit of the industry sentiment when he tweeted, Both XAI and Meta seem to be falling behind, based on the Grok 4.2 benchmarks in this reporting. Frontier AI models are really a three-way race at this point. Speaking of XAI, it seems like there are big moves afoot in that organization. First of all, they grabbed a pair of senior leaders from Cursor in a bid to catch up on coding.
Sources speaking with the information said that Andrew Millich and Jason Ginsberg have joined XAI and will report directly to Elon Musk. The pair worked as heads of product for engineering at Cursor. Now, the move comes as Elon acknowledges that XAI is behind on coding. During a conference appearance on Wednesday, Musk admitted the problem but said he expects XAI to catch up and exceed our competitors, his words, by the middle of the year. Meanwhile, XAI co-founders keep heading for the exits. Business Insider reports that Zhiheng Dai left the company earlier this week, and Guorong Zhang has told colleagues he plans to leave in the coming days. For those keeping track at home, that's another two departures to make a total of six co-founders leaving this year.
Only three of the 12 co-founders remain at the company, and one of them is Elon Musk himself.
What recent developments have occurred with Meta's AI model?
Now, there's been speculation that some of these co-founders exited after projects they led fell short of Elon's expectations.
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