Alexandr Wang tells Meta employees Watermelon has caught GPT-5.5
The benchmark claim gives Zuckerberg a talking point for Meta's $125 billion-plus AI infrastructure buildout, but Watermelon is still unreleased.
By Ryan Merket · Published · Updated
Primary source: Business Insider
Why it matters
Meta has spent aggressively to buy talent and compute. Watermelon is the first visible test of whether Alexandr Wang can turn that spending into frontier-model credibility.
Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang told employees in an internal town hall this week that the company's next major model, codenamed Watermelon, has caught up with OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on closely watched benchmarks, Business Insider reports.
In the meeting, Wang said Watermelon is in training and uses an order of magnitude more compute than Avocado, Meta's internal codename for Muse Spark, per the report.
The catch is that the claim is still internal. Wang did not identify the specific tests behind the comparison, and Meta has not released Watermelon publicly or disclosed the exact benchmarks.
In April, Meta released the first in a series of models called Muse Spark, which performed well on benchmarks but did not match or exceed OpenAI or labs such as Anthropic, according to Business Insider.
GPT-5.5 was OpenAI's flagship in April. OpenAI debuted GPT-5.6 late last month but has not released it generally yet, based on requests from the U.S. government, per the report.
Why it matters: Meta has been trying to close the gap with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Meta told investors this year that 2026 capital expenditures are expected to be between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from an earlier forecast of $115 billion to $135 billion, citing rising component costs and additional data center spending, per Business Insider.
Zuckerberg appointed Wang last year to lead the renamed Meta Superintelligence Labs. Meta's June 2025 deal with Scale gave Meta a 49% stake, valued Scale at more than $29 billion, and brought Wang and a small group of Scale employees into the push. Wang remained on Scale's board while Jason Droege became interim CEO, Business Insider reported.
For now, Watermelon remains an internal project and the benchmark names are undisclosed. If the results hold up publicly, they would mark real progress for Meta; the test begins when outside users can measure the model on their own workloads.