DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 21 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms' new artificial intelligence lab has delivered its first high-profile AI models internally this month, the company's chief technology officer said on Wednesday.
At a press briefing on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, CTO Andrew Bosworth said the models built by its Meta Superintelligence Labs team, formed last year, showed a lot of promise.
"They're basically six months into the work, not quite even," Bosworth said, adding that the team's AI models were "very good".
Media outlets reported in December that Meta was working on a text AI model codenamed Avocado slated for a first-quarter launch, along with an image and video-focused model codenamed Mango. Bosworth did not specify which models were delivered internally.
Meta's efforts are being closely followed since CEO Mark Zuckerberg moved to shake up its AI leadership, form a new lab and poach talent with sky-high offers, hoping the company can win in the highly competitive technology frontier.
Meta had faced criticism over the performance of itsLlama 4 model at a time when rivals, such as Alphabet's Google and others, have seized momentum in the race for transformational and lucrative AI.
Bosworth said the technology was not yet finished.
Speaking in general terms about the development cycle, Bosworth said: "There's a tremendous amount of work to do post-training" for AI, "to actually deliver the model in a way that's usable internally and by consumers."
He said, however, that Meta was starting to see favorable returns from its big gambits in 2025, which he called a "tremendously chaoticyear" for Meta building its lab, infrastructure, and procuring power.
Bosworth said 2026 and 2027 would see consumer AI trends firm up because recent advances had delivered models that already answer "the kinds of things that you ask every day with your family, your kids," even as technological development could improve results for more complex queries.
That is why the next two years were important for bringing consumer products to market, he said.
Meta is marketing AI-equipped Ray-Ban Display glasses and paused their international expansion earlier this month to prioritize fulfillingU.S. orders.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in Davos, Switzerland. Editing by Paritosh Bansal, Mark Potter and Tomasz Janowski)
