We’ve all known that Meta isn’t truly “for” open source. Shocker, I know—but now Meta has fully committed to the “anti” open source game plan, and it might bite them sooner than you’d think.
The Signal
Meta is done pretending.
Once the loudest megaphone for open-source AI, Meta has decided it would rather lock the door. The next big model—Avocado—won’t show up until Q1 2026. And when it does, it lives behind a closed wall inside Meta Superintelligence Labs.
This isn’t a philosophical shift. It’s a reaction.
Llama 4 landed with a thud. Developers shrugged. The architecture leaked into places Meta didn’t like—including Chinese startup DeepSeek. And suddenly openness looked less like leadership and more like liability.
Beautiful, right?
The Mechanism
Here’s how the machine actually moves.
Meta reorganized its entire AI operation into four silos: research, products, infrastructure, and advanced model development. Avocado sits in the last one, run by TBD Lab under Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.
And the cost showed up fast.
Key people walked. Chris Cox. Yann LeCun. Internal friction spiked—pay gaps, compute bottlenecks, and a hiring process so centralized it slowed teams down. Collaboration didn’t just weaken. It became procedural.
And this is the quiet part: open-source only works when developers care. Interest dried up. So Meta followed the incentives.
Now Meta stands shoulder to shoulder with OpenAI and Google, building closed systems, competing model against model, wall against wall.
The Verdict
This is bad for AI. Full stop.
Open models force accountability. They invite inspection. They move faster because thousands of outsiders pull on the same rope. Meta helped normalize that dynamic—and now it’s reversing course.
The industry doesn’t get a neutral outcome here. It gets fragmentation. Fewer shared baselines. Less visibility into how powerful systems behave.
And Meta doesn’t escape the trade-off. Closed models demand internal excellence. No community to patch mistakes. No external pressure to keep ethics sharp.
But Meta made its bet.
Open source was leverage—until it wasn’t. Now the bill is due, and the rest of the AI world pays part of it too.