Meta's Watermelon, the internal codename for its next frontier large language model after the Muse Spark series, carries an October 2026 release target according to internal documents reported in late August. A July pre-training pause and resumption extended the timeline, while chief AI officer Alexandr Wang claimed in an internal July town hall that the model matches OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on unnamed benchmarks using roughly 10x the compute of prior versions. Mark Zuckerberg's September 2 watermelon emoji tease raised expectations ahead of Meta Connect, but no launch or weights appeared at the September 23 keynote. As of mid-October, the model remains unreleased with no public benchmarks, API, or official confirmation, leaving trader sentiment anchored to the narrow window for an October drop versus a November slip amid Meta's broader scaling push.