Meta's reported internal target of an October 2026 release for its frontier "Watermelon" large language model, still in training as of early October, drives current trader sentiment. Internal documents cited by The Information in August pointed to that window after a July pre-training pause, with Meta Superintelligence Labs chief Alexandr Wang stating in a July town hall that the model uses roughly 10× the compute of Muse Spark and reached parity with OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on unnamed internal benchmarks. No official announcement, weights, or product launch has occurred, including at the September Meta Connect event. Heavy capital spending on infrastructure and competitive positioning against OpenAI and Anthropic remain central, with upcoming earnings or developer updates as potential near-term catalysts for any timeline shifts.