Alibaba jumped 3% at one time in premarket trading while Meta fell 1%. Meta refined new AI model using Alibaba's Qwen, Bloomberg reported.
Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, months into building one of the priciest teams in technology history, is getting personally involved in day-to-day work and pivoting the company’s focus to an artificial intelligence model it can make money off of.
One new model, codenamed Avocado, is expected to debut sometime next spring, and may be launched as a “closed” model — one that can be tightly controlled and that Meta can sell access to, according to people familiar with the matter, who declined to speak publicly about internal plans. The move, which aligns with what rivals Google and OpenAI do with their models, would mark the biggest departure to date from the open-source strategy Meta has touted for years. Open-source models allow outside developers and researchers to review and build upon the code. Meta’s new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang is an advocate of closed models, according to the people.
Meta’s strategy shifted dramatically earlier this year after the company released Llama 4, an open-source model that disappointed Silicon Valley and Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive officer. He sidelined some of the people who worked on that project and personally recruited top AI researchers and leaders, in some cases offering them hundreds of millions of dollars in multiyear pay packages, and some, like Wang, who came in through a $14.3 billion investment deal. Now, Zuckerberg spends much of his time and energy working closely with those new hires, in a group called TBD Lab.
The TBD group is using several third-party models as part of the training process for Avocado, distilling from rival models including Google’s Gemma, OpenAI’s gpt-oss and Qwen, a model from the Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the people said.
Training the new model on Chinese technology signals a shift in tone for Zuckerberg, who raised concerns on Joe Rogan’s podcast in January that Chinese models could be shaped by state censorship. Zuckerberg has since repeatedly advocated for US government support for American tech companies seeking to dominate the global AI race before China can, and said his open-source strategy was part of leading that mission. But Llama and other US efforts have fallen behind. “China is well ahead — way ahead on open-source,” Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this month.
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