Meta's internal push to close the frontier gap with OpenAI drives current trader sentiment around the Watermelon model. Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang told employees in a July 2026 town hall that the still-training system—successor to the April-released Muse Spark—had reached parity with GPT-5.5 on unnamed internal benchmarks while using roughly 10 times the compute. Reporting from The Information and CNBC points to an October 2026 target after a July pre-training pause, though the model was not unveiled at Meta Connect in September and remains unreleased as of early October. Mark Zuckerberg's September emoji tease and Wang's public comments on upcoming coding and agentic gains for the Muse Spark line add momentum, yet the lack of external benchmarks or official confirmation keeps the outcome sensitive to any last-minute launch signals or delays.