The Great Close: Why Meta Abandoned Open Source for "Avocado"

For years, Meta stood as the "Robin Hood" of the AI industry. While OpenAI and Google hid their models behind black boxes and APIs, Meta gave theirs away. The Llama series became the backbone of the global AI developer community, powering everything from startup innovations to academic research.

But in late 2025, the gates slammed shut.

Meta has officially pivoted away from its open-source strategy, shelving the Llama brand in favor of a new, closed-source initiative codenamed "Project Avocado." This isn't just a rebrand; it is a fundamental restructuring of Meta’s DNA, driven by geopolitical fears, technical setbacks, and a ruthless new leadership culture.

Here is the inside story of why the open-source era at Meta is over.

1. The "DeepSeek" Shock

The primary catalyst for closing the garden was the rise of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab. In early 2025, DeepSeek released "DeepSeek R1," a model that rivaled the performance of top-tier US models. Forensic analysis revealed that DeepSeek had heavily utilized Meta’s open Llama architecture to achieve these results.

By releasing their weights, Meta had inadvertently subsidized the R&D of a geopolitical rival, allowing them to skip the expensive trial-and-error phase of pre-training. This "distillation" crisis turned Meta’s open-source strategy from a market advantage into a national security liability, giving CEO Mark Zuckerberg the political cover to lock down future intellectual property.

2. The Failure of "Behemoth"

Internally, the Llama roadmap hit a wall. The planned flagship model, Llama 4 "Behemoth" (a massive 2-trillion parameter dense model), failed to meet internal benchmarks for reasoning and agentic planning.

While Meta released smaller "Scout" and "Maverick" models in April 2025, they received mixed reviews. Developers noted that while efficient, they lacked the "spark" of GPT-4o, struggling with complex coding tasks. The failure of the open-source flagship to dominate the leaderboard made it harder to justify the $70+ billion in annual capital expenditures required to train it.

3. Enter Alexandr Wang and the "TBD Lab"

To fix the crisis, Zuckerberg made a $14.3 billion bet: he acquired a stake in Scale AI and installed its 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, as Meta’s new Chief AI Officer.

Wang has instituted a "cultural revolution" inside Meta AI. He formed the secretive "TBD Lab" to build Avocado, isolated from the rest of the company. The academic, peer-review culture of the past has been replaced by a "demo, don't memo" philosophy. The new standard is grueling: 70-hour workweeks are now the norm as the team races to catch up to OpenAI.

This shift led to the departure of AI legend Yann LeCun, who left in late 2025 to start his own venture, signaling the end of the academic-led era at Meta.

4. What is Project Avocado?

Scheduled for release in Q1 2026, Avocado is Meta’s bid for "Superintelligence." Unlike Llama, it will be:

• Proprietary: No weights will be released. Access will likely be through APIs or Meta's products.
• Multimodal: It is designed to handle video, audio, and sensory data natively, likely to power future AR glasses.
• Safety-First: A closed model allows Meta to prevent the "jailbreaking" issues that plagued DeepSeek R1 and Llama.

The Verdict

The "Avocado" pivot marks the maturation of the AI industry. The era of free, frontier-level open weights is likely over. For developers, this means the future may require relying on paid APIs from the giants—Meta included. For Meta, it is a $72 billion gamble that a closed garden can grow fruit that the open wild never could.

Author : Aetherion