Meta confirms open-source Avocado and Mango variants alongside closed flagships
Meta has confirmed it will release open-weights versions of its next two frontier models, codenamed Avocado and Mango, while keeping the largest variants proprietary — a hybrid strategy that splits the difference between Llama's open-source heritage and the closed-model economics of rival labs.
Both open variants are scheduled for release in 2026. Meta describes them as competitive with the proprietary versions for most workloads but trailing on the largest-scale agentic tasks. The split signals a maturing of Meta's open-source posture: less "all weights, all the time" and more "tiered release calibrated to capability ceiling."
The strategic logic mirrors what Anthropic and OpenAI have done by keeping their largest models proprietary while releasing smaller open-ish artifacts (Anthropic's research papers, OpenAI's gpt-oss line). Meta is now the last major Western lab on a hybrid path; everyone else has either gone fully closed (OpenAI, Anthropic) or fully open at scale (Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen, Moonshot, Z.ai).