Meta has quietly slipped its long-anticipated Avocado model to a June launch after internal testing placed it between Gemini 2.5 and 3.0, and below threshold against GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 on the benchmarks the company had targeted for May. The delay extends an open-weights lead that Chinese labs have built — Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4, and GLM-5.1 are all current options for teams who can't or won't deploy a US frontier model. Meta's open-weights roadmap depends on Avocado clearing a credibility bar; the longer it slips, the harder that gets.