Zuckerberg's $14B AI Bet Falters — Meta Mulls Licensing Google Gemini

Fortune·high signal

Meta's flagship model 'Avocado' has been delayed from March to May 2026 after testing showed it performs between Gemini 2.5 and 3.0—still behind the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models—despite $14.3B invested and the formation of Alexandr Wang's AI super team nine months ago. In a striking reversal, Meta's leadership reportedly discussed temporarily licensing Google's Gemini to cover the gap, a scenario Fortune describes as previously 'almost impossible to imagine' given Meta and Google's competition across advertising, video, and hardware. The delay is the clearest data point yet on the sustained difficulty of frontier model development even with massive capital.