According to Ethan Mollick on X, citing Andrew Curran and The New York Times reporting, Meta has delayed the release of its Avocado model until at least May after it underperformed on internal evaluations, and is considering licensing Google’s Gemini as a stopgap; combined with Grok 4.2 benchmark results, this suggests xAI and Meta are trailing the current frontier AI leaders (source: Ethan Mollick post referencing NYT and Andrew Curran). According to the shared reporting, the competitive landscape now resembles a three-way race among top frontier models, intensifying focus on model quality, time-to-market, and partnership strategies (source: Ethan Mollick post). For businesses, this indicates near-term reliability advantages may cluster around the top-performing frontier models, while Meta’s potential Gemini licensing could accelerate product readiness via integration rather than in-house scale-up (source: Ethan Mollick post referencing NYT).