Meta’s unreleased Watermelon model remains the key driver of trader sentiment, with internal claims from Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang in a July 2026 town hall that the still-training frontier large language model matches OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 on unnamed benchmarks while using roughly 10× the compute of the April Muse Spark release. This scaling effort, part of Meta’s $125–145 billion infrastructure push, positions Watermelon as the intended successor to power enhanced agent capabilities across Meta platforms. As of late September 2026, reporting indicates Meta is accelerating integration plans after stabilizing the Muse agent platform, though no public release, weights, model card, or independent benchmarks have appeared. Traders are watching for any October 2026 window or Text Arena-style evaluation that could confirm competitive positioning against OpenAI and Anthropic.