Meta is Developing a New Image and Video Model for a 2026 Release, Report Says

It's all hands on deck at Meta as the company develops new AI models in its superintelligence lab, led by Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang. The company is now working on an image- and video-model codenamed "Mango," along with a new text-based model internally known as "Avocado," The Wall Street Journal reported.

The tech giant plans to release the new models in the first half of 2026, the publication said, citing an internal Q&A at Meta on Thursday, during which Wang and chief product officer Chris Cox unveiled the new roadmap.

Wang Haid Meta aims to improve the text-based model's ability to code while also exploring new world models that understand visual information and can reason, plan, and act without being trained on every possibility.

Meta has recently fallen behind rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI race. The company's AI division underwent significant restructuring this year, including leadership changes and the poaching of researchers from other top companies. However, several of the researchers who joined Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) have already left the company.

Last month, the company's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, also announced that he's leaving to create his own startup.

Meta doesn't yet have a winning AI product. Instead, Meta AI assistant's numbers are buoyed by the company's existing social networks, which span billions of users, since the assistant is placed in the search bar of its apps.

This means the first projects and models from MSL will have a lot riding on them.