Matthias Bastian
Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER, exploring how AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between humans and computers.
Read full article about: Meta is reportedly ditching open Llama models for Avocado, a closed model built for direct sales
According to Bloomberg's sources, Meta is shifting its focus to a new AI model codenamed "Avocado," with a release potentially coming next spring. Avocado is expected to launch as a closed model, letting the company sell access directly. This marks a major shift from Meta's established open-model strategy. Internally, the open-source approach reportedly lost steam after the disappointing performance of Llama 4. Management is betting big on Alexandr Wang, who joined Meta following the company's deal with Scale AI.
The development process involves some surprising ingredients. According to Bloomberg, the team is training Avocado using several external models, including Google's Gemma, OpenAI's gpt-oss, and Alibaba's Qwen. Using Chinese technology clashes with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's previous warnings about Chinese censorship.
Read full article about: Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis predicts three major AI trends for 2026
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google Deepmind, expects the next year to bring major progress in multimodal models, interactive video worlds, and more reliable AI agents. Speaking at the Axios AI+ Summit, Hassabis noted that Gemini's multimodal capabilities are already powering new applications. He used a scene from "Fight Club" to illustrate the point: instead of just describing the action, the AI interpreted a character removing a ring as a philosophical symbol of renouncing everyday life. Google's latest image model uses similar capabilities to precisely understand visual content, allowing it to generate complex outputs like infographics, something that wasn't previously possible.
Hassabis says AI agents will be "close" to handling complex tasks autonomously within a year, aligning with the timeline he predicted in May 2024. The goal is a universal assistant that works across devices to manage daily life. Deepmind is also developing "world models" like Genie 3, which generate interactive, explorable video spaces.
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Source: Axios via YouTube