Meta’s Watermelon model, the frontier-scale successor to the April 2026 Muse Spark family, remains the central driver of trader sentiment following internal July claims by AI chief Alexandr Wang that it had reached GPT-5.5 parity on unnamed benchmarks while consuming roughly ten times the compute of its predecessor. Reports from August cited an October 2026 target release, yet the model did not appear at the September Meta Connect keynote and is still described as in training or post-pause evaluation. Competitive pressure from OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 and other labs, combined with Meta’s heavy infrastructure spend, frames the upcoming weeks as the key window for any public Text Arena debut or capability demonstration that could shift implied probabilities.