Prime Highlights :
- Meta’s superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang says the company’s upcoming Watermelon model has matched OpenAI’s flagship GPT 5.5.
- The claim marks Meta’s strongest sign yet that its massive AI investment is beginning to pay off.
Key Facts :
- Watermelon uses an order of magnitude more compute than Meta’s earlier Avocado model, according to Wang.
- OpenAI released GPT 5.5 in April and unveiled its more powerful GPT 5.6 last month, though it remains unreleased pending US government review.
Background :
Meta is closing the gap in the AI model race, according to superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang, who told employees during an internal town hall that the company’s upcoming model has caught up with OpenAI’s flagship system.
Wang said Meta’s next model, codenamed Watermelon, has matched OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 based on closely followed AI benchmarks, according to two people familiar with the matter. The specific benchmarks he cited remain unclear.
According to a person familiar with the matter, Wang told the town hall that Watermelon, the successor to Meta’s Avocado model, is currently in training and uses significantly more compute power than its predecessor.
Wang addressed the progress publicly as well. In a post on X, he said an update to the current Muse Spark model is coming soon, bringing major gains in coding and agentic capabilities designed to close the gap with competing models.
When a user asked when Meta would release a coding model comparable to Anthropic’s Claude Opus, Wang responded that the timeline was close, adding that users would be pleased with what the company has in development.
Meta’s AI strategy has centered on narrowing the distance between itself and OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Despite heavy investment in chips, data centers and talent, the company has faced challenges convincing developers and customers that its models rank among the industry’s best.
If Wang’s assessment holds up, it would represent the clearest evidence so far that Meta’s spending and aggressive hiring push are starting to show results, even as competition in the field continues moving at a fast pace.