A new chapter in the technological race is unfolding in the artificial intelligence industry. At a closed internal meeting of Meta, the head of the superintelligence division, Alexander Wang, made a bold statement: the company's future model, codenamed Watermelon, has achieved performance metrics comparable to OpenAI's flagship GPT-5.5.
News of the breakthrough appeared in the media citing Business Insider. Alexander Wang, appointed by Mark Zuckerberg as the head of Meta Superintelligence Labs last year, confirmed that the Watermelon model is in the active training phase and will be the next major release after the base model Muse Spark (Avocado), which launched in April 2026.
Resources and Project Scale
The development of Watermelon required colossal investments in infrastructure. The training of the new model utilizes three times more computational resources and graphics chips compared to its predecessor, Avocado. This was made possible thanks to the total mobilization of Meta's financial resources and an aggressive infrastructure expansion strategy.
Company leadership has already informed investors about massive capital expenditures. This year, expected spending on microchip procurement, construction of new data centers, and infrastructure expansion is projected to range from $125 to $145 billion.
New Capabilities and Personnel Blitzkrieg
In the public sphere, Alexander Wang has already confirmed that the upcoming update to the Muse Spark family will bring significant improvements in programming skills and the autonomous operation of AI agents. Furthermore, in response to user questions about competition with Anthropic's Claude Opus model, the division head promised that a worthy rival would appear soon enough.
The project's success is largely due to Mark Zuckerberg's personnel policy. The company is conducting an aggressive campaign to poach the industry's top specialists. According to insiders, Meta is offering top researchers individual contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars just to join the elite research group codenamed TBD.
Competition Context
The race for superintelligence does not stop for a moment. OpenAI's powerful GPT-5.5 model, released in April of this year, became the benchmark for Watermelon developers. However, competitors are not standing still: at the end of last month, OpenAI officially unveiled its most advanced model, GPT-5.6. Notably, developers have not yet released it to the general public, following requests from the US government.
Meta representatives officially declined to comment on the results of internal meetings, while OpenAI did not respond to journalist inquiries. Nevertheless, the announced infrastructure budget figures and the first benchmarks of Watermelon indicate that Meta has firmly established itself in the top league of artificial intelligence developers.
