AI project Avocado: Meta's departure from the open standard and the beginning of a new AI doctrine? – Image: Xpert.Digital
The End of Free AI? How DeepSeek's Rise Radically Changed Meta's Strategy
Zuckerberg's 100 billion dollar bet: Why Meta is breaking with open-source tradition in spring 2026
In the spring of 2026, an era will end in Silicon Valley – and a new, more ruthless one will begin. For a long time, Mark Zuckerberg was considered the surprising Robin Hood of artificial intelligence. While competitors like OpenAI and Google guarded their algorithms like state secrets, Meta democratized access to high technology with its Llama series.
But this era of digital generosity is heading towards an abrupt end. Under the internal codename Gerne: “Project Avocado,” the tech giant is now preparing a radical change of course. The romanticized notion that a single company could foot the bill for global technological progress has been shattered by the harsh reality of balance sheets.
When infrastructure costs approach the $100 billion mark and geopolitical rivals like DeepSeek benefit from Western openness, altruism becomes a business risk. Meta's abandonment of the open standard is far more than just a technical note; it's an attempt to become the operating system for the automated economy of the coming years. The following analysis explores why Meta is building its walls, how the new model could irrevocably change the advertising industry, and why this move permanently reshuffles the power dynamics in Silicon Valley. Welcome to the era of the closed value chain.
There are now several independent reports that Meta plans to abandon its previous open-source approach for a new AI model (“Avocado”) in the spring of 2026 and offer it as a closed, proprietary model.
Several tech and financial media outlets report that Meta is working on a new top-of-the-line model codenamed "Avocado," whose market launch has been postponed from 2025 to the first quarter or spring of 2026. Unlike Llama 2/3/4, "Avocado" will reportedly no longer offer open weights, but will only be accessible through a controlled or licensed process.
Sources indicate that Meta is internally pursuing a "closed" approach to build directly monetizable enterprise products and better protect its technological advantages over competitors. At the same time, Meta is pushing ahead with a massive infrastructure investment program for AI data centers and cloud capacity (expenditure of approximately $70-72 billion in 2025, with budgets increasing further in 2026).
Meta was previously the only US tech giant to make large language models with open weights (the Llama series) available, explicitly differentiating itself from Google, OpenAI, and others. However, as early as summer 2025, Zuckerberg indicated that Meta would be using "a mix of open and closed models" in the future, and that not everything would have to be open source.
The plans now described for "Avocado"—closed weights, stricter access control, and a focus on paying enterprise customers—are explicitly interpreted in several reports as a break with Meta's previous open-source positioning. Strictly speaking, this is therefore not a complete withdrawal from open source (Llama 4 remains open), but rather a strategic shift towards a dual-source model with a clearly proprietary, high-end flagship product starting in spring 2026.
Why the planned model launch in spring 2026 marks the end of open-source romance and how Zuckerberg is reshuffling the cards in Silicon Valley.
The unveiling of Meta's new AI model, codenamed Avocado, announced for next spring, marks far more than just a routine product cycle in the tech industry's calendar. It signals a fundamental shift in strategy that could turn the economic logic of AI development on its head. While the world is still processing the mixed reactions to Llama 4, released in April 2025, a quiet revolution is taking place in Menlo Park. Under the leadership of the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs and the recently recruited Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang, Meta appears to be abandoning its role as a patron of the open-source community. Analyzing this move reveals a complex mix of geopolitical pressure, exploding infrastructure costs, and the urgent need to finally monetize the massive investments in data centers. Avocado is not simply another language model; it is an attempt to become the operating system for the automated economy of the second half of this decade.
From an idealistic ecosystem to a closed value chain
Until now, Meta followed a clear, almost classic strategy of commodifying the complement. By making powerful models like the Llama series openly and largely free of charge, Mark Zuckerberg undermined the business models of competitors like OpenAI and Google, who hid their algorithms behind paywalls. The logic was compelling: if intelligence itself becomes a free public good, the value shifts to proprietary data and the user base—two areas where Meta, with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, seemed unassailable. But the year 2025 brutally exposed the weaknesses of this doctrine.
The release of Llama 4 in April 2025 brought technical advancements, but failed to trigger the hoped-for dominance. Instead, global players, particularly Chinese labs like DeepSeek, leveraged Meta's open architecture to train competitive or even superior models at a fraction of the cost. Meta effectively funded the research of its geopolitical and economic rivals. With Avocado, the company is now drawing the consequences. Reports indicate that this model will be designed as a proprietary system accessible only through APIs and Meta's own hosting services.
From an economic perspective, this represents a transition from a defensive strategy to an aggressive offensive. Meta is no longer willing to lay the foundations upon which others build their skyscrapers. Instead, Avocado is intended to be the exclusive engine powering Meta's own products. The value of AI is being internalized. This means that companies wishing to build on Meta's infrastructure in the future will no longer own the code, but will have to pay rent for the intelligence. It is the move from infrastructure provider to platform monopolist in the AI sector.
The capital cost trap and the pressure for immediate profitability
A key driver for this change of course is the stark financial reality of AI scaling. Investment spending on AI infrastructure has reached dimensions that even for a cash-flow giant like Meta can hardly justify through indirect effects anymore. When capital expenditures for GPU clusters and power supply approach the $100 billion mark per year, it's no longer enough for AI to simply increase user engagement on Instagram by a few percentage points.
Avocado needs to make money – directly. The decision to no longer disclose its model is directly linked to the need to establish pricing power. In an open-source world, margins for pure model providers tend toward zero, since switching costs are low and developers can always switch to a cheaper, self-hosted alternative. In a closed ecosystem, however, Meta can dictate prices as long as the model's performance significantly outperforms that of free alternatives.
This is where the role of Meta Superintelligence Labs comes into play. By consolidating the various AI research departments under central, product-oriented leadership, research efficiency is drastically increased. The focus shifts from academic reputation to industrial applicability. Avocado is being honed to solve specific, high-value tasks in the corporate world, for which customers are willing to pay premium prices. The era of AI as a scientific experiment is over; the era of AI as an investment has begun.
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Automated advertising by 2026: How Avocado is shifting value creation from agencies to meta-platforms
Automation of the advertising industry as the ultimate product
Perhaps the strongest argument for Avocado's closed nature lies in its planned integration into Meta's advertising engine. By 2026, the company plans to almost completely automate the creation and delivery of advertising. Avocado will not function as a chatbot, but rather as a creative director, media planner, and data analyst all in one. Advertisers will simply specify a goal and a budget; the system will generate images, text, videos, and variations in real time and optimize them with microsecond precision to match users' psychological profiles.
If Meta were to disclose the technology underlying this system, the company would be relinquishing its most valuable asset. The "secret sauce" is no longer just the social graph, i.e., who knows whom, but the "cognitive graph"—the understanding of how to most effectively motivate people to take action with generated content. Avocado is trained to maximize conversions.
In this scenario, the AI model merges with the advertising platform to form a single unit. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this means a massive reduction in barriers to entry, as expensive agency services are replaced by software. For the agency sector, however, a tectonic shift is imminent. If Avocado creates better creatives than a human team and seamlessly integrates them into the campaign, human labor in this sector will become a luxury or a bottleneck. From an economic perspective, Meta is thus transferring added value from the service sector (agencies) directly to its own balance sheet.
Sovereignty and security in a fragmented world
Beyond purely commercial aspects, the geopolitical component plays a crucial role in the decision to adopt a closed model. The era of global technological cooperation is drawing to a close. The US government and security agencies increasingly view advanced AI models as a national security resource. The fact that Chinese labs like DeepSeek were able to utilize architectures developed in the US at a cost of billions has caused concern in Washington.
By keeping avocado proprietary, Meta aligns itself more closely with US security interests. This could prove advantageous in future regulatory processes or government contracts. At the same time, a closed model allows for significantly stricter control over the output. In an era where AI hallucinations and disinformation can influence elections, the issue of liability is an incalculable risk. A proprietary model allows Meta to hard-code security filters and ethical guidelines, preventing users from easily removing these modifications, as is possible with open models.
This creates a precarious situation for the European market. Due to the strict regulations of the AI Act and the GDPR, it is conceivable that Avocado will initially be unavailable in the EU or only available in a severely restricted form. This could further widen the technological gap between the US and Europe. European companies would then either have to resort to older, open models or find ways to use US services while complying with local laws, which would further cement their dependence on American technology.
The end of innocence and the new market reality
In summary, the introduction of avocados in spring 2026 signals a maturation process for the AI industry. The phase of wild exploration, in which progress was shared for its own sake, is being replaced by a phase of consolidation and commercialization. Mark Zuckerberg, once celebrated as the great democratizer of AI, is transforming into the architect of a new “walled garden.”
For investors and market observers, this is a positive signal, as it points to a clear path to profitability. For the open-source community, however, it is a bitter setback. The hope that a tech giant would permanently bear the costs for the public has proven to be an illusion. The market will now split: on the one hand, highly specialized, extremely powerful, and expensive proprietary systems like Avocado, GPT-5, and Gemini; on the other hand, an open-source movement that, while remaining vital, could lose touch with the absolute top tier because it lacks access to the necessary $100 billion data centers.
The avocado is therefore more than a product. It is the symbol of a new economic era in which intelligence is a commodity that is strictly rationed, highly priced, and strategically used as a weapon in the competition for the total attention and budgets of the global economy.
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