Meta’s Tilt From Open Source To Make-Money AI Model

Anurag Rana, Bloomberg Intelligence Technology Analyst, discusses Meta's push toward building an AI model it can capitalize on. Plus, a look at Bloomberg Intelligence's Cross-Industry AI Survey results.

Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, months into building one of the priciest teams in technology history, is getting personally involved in day-to-day work and pivoting the company’s focus to an artificial intelligence model it can make money off of.

One new model, codenamed Avocado, is expected to debut sometime next spring, and may be launched as a “closed” model — one that can be tightly controlled and that Meta can sell access to, according to people familiar with the matter, who declined to speak publicly about internal plans. The move, which aligns with what rivals Google and OpenAI do with their models, would mark the biggest departure to date from the open-source strategy Meta has touted for years. Open-source models allow outside developers and researchers to review and build upon the code. Meta’s new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang is an advocate of closed models, according to the people.

Meta’s strategy shifted dramatically earlier this year after the company released Llama 4, an open-source model that disappointed Silicon Valley and Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive officer. He sidelined some of the people who worked on that project and personally recruited top AI researchers and leaders, in some cases offering them hundreds of millions of dollars in multiyear pay packages, and some, like Wang, who came in through a $14.3 billion investment deal. Now, Zuckerberg spends much of his time and energy working closely with those new hires, in a group called TBD Lab.

The TBD group is using several third-party models as part of the training process for Avocado, distilling from rival models including Google’s Gemma, OpenAI’s gpt-oss and Qwen, a model from the Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the people said.

Training the new model on Chinese technology signals a shift in tone for Zuckerberg, who raised concerns on Joe Rogan’s podcast in January that Chinese models could be shaped by state censorship. Zuckerberg has since repeatedly advocated for US government support for American tech companies seeking to dominate the global AI race before China can, and said his open-source strategy was part of leading that mission. But Llama and other US efforts have fallen behind. “China is well ahead — way ahead on open-source,” Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this month.

A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.

Zuckerberg has long maintained that giving the public access to emerging tools and technologies, particularly in AI, strengthens Meta’s products and encourages wider adoption. He’s likened Meta’s open-source approach for AI to Google’s Android operating system for smartphones. While Meta already builds some closed models for internal use, and Zuckerberg has teased the idea of developing other closed models in the past, several iterations of Meta’s current flagship AI model, Llama, are open-source.

On an earnings call with investors in late July, Zuckerberg hinted that the company would pursue both open and close models moving forward.

AI has become Meta’s top priority, commanding the bulk of spending and attention from executives as Meta races against rivals to become the first company to achieve AI models that can surpass human-level capabilities. Zuckerberg has pledged to spend $600 billion on US infrastructure projects over the next three years, most of them AI-related. He’s also redistributing some of Meta’s investments internally, planning meaningful cuts to its virtual reality and metaverse efforts in favor of putting that spending into AI glasses and other related hardware, people familiar with the matter have said.

Still, Meta’s AI spending has become the focus of Wall Street investors, who recently balked at Zuckerberg’s pledge to continue investing heavily into 2026.

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