Amid increasing global competition in technology, the U.S. tech giant Meta (formerly Facebook) has recently announced that its next-generation AI large model "Avocado" is expected to be officially released in the first quarter of 2024. During the development process, this new model used Alibaba's Qwen model for distillation learning, aiming to enhance its AI capabilities through this technology.
Insiders revealed that "Avocado" may be launched in a "closed-source" format, meaning that Meta will strictly control access to the model and may even sell usage rights to external customers. Meta CEO Zuckerberg has given high priority to this project, personally participating in daily operations, and plans to shift the company's strategic focus toward monetizable AI products.
Notably, during the development of AI technology, Meta had once ambitiously aimed to promote an open-source AI ecosystem. However, their choice to refer to models from industry competitors clearly reflects the pressure the company faces in the AI field. Over the past year, Meta has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in AI research and development, but due to unclear strategies and internal team instability, the company's market performance has not met expectations.
The "Avocado" project is being developed by the TBD Lab, led by newly appointed Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang. The team integrated multiple well-known AI models, including Google's Gemma and OpenAI's gpt-oss, when building the model. Through distillation learning, Meta hopes to extract useful knowledge from these powerful models to enhance its product capabilities.
However, Meta's progress in this area has not been smooth. The misstep in releasing Llama4 forced the company to adjust its strategy, leading to a series of executive changes. Zuckerberg must prove the effectiveness of his "super intelligence" strategy under investor pressure. Although Meta's newly launched AI short video platform Vibes aims to compete with OpenAI's Sora2, its market performance has been relatively modest, highlighting the challenges faced in the AI competition.
In this context, the "Avocado" project has been placed under great expectations, becoming a key factor for Meta in the AI competition. Whether it can achieve technological breakthroughs in the coming months will directly affect Meta's position in the AI market.
