Meta Superintelligence Labs chief Alexandr Wang told employees at an internal town hall that the company’s next major AI model — codenamed “Watermelon” — has caught up to OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 on closely watched AI benchmarks, according to Business Insider, which reviewed a recording of the meeting. The report was published July 4, 2026.
The announcement positions Meta as a potential peer to frontier AI leaders, though Wang did not name which benchmarks were cited, and neither Meta nor OpenAI has publicly confirmed the claim.
What is Watermelon?
Watermelon is Meta’s next model in development, the successor to Avocado — the internal codename for Muse Spark, released in April 2026. Wang said Watermelon uses “an order of magnitude more compute” than its predecessor, indicating a significantly larger training run. He also noted that an updated version of Muse Spark, with “significant improvements in coding and agentic capabilities,” is due “pretty soon.”
Caveats and context
Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the same town hall, was more measured. He acknowledged Meta’s AI development “hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” tempering Wang’s optimism about Watermelon.
GPT-5.5 itself was released by OpenAI in April 2026; OpenAI has since previewed GPT-5.6, though that rollout was limited following requests from the Trump administration. Whether Watermelon is closing the gap with the current frontier or catching up to an older benchmark target remains unclear until the model is publicly released.
Watermelon is still in training with no announced release date. Meta declined to comment; OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.