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Is Avocado… Toast?
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Meta’s big new AI model is delayed because they still can’t get to state of the art. The social media addiction trial is winding down. All the video apps are going to end up looking exactly like one another eventually. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions.
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Foreign welcome to the Tech we ride home for Friday, March 13, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Meta's big new AI model is delayed because they still can't get to state of the art. Apparently the social media addiction trial is winding down. All the video apps are going to end up looking exactly like one another eventually. And of course, the weekend long Read Suggestions here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Sources tell the Times that Meta has delayed the launch of its big Avocado AI model to at least May over performance concerns and also discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power its products in the meantime. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said in July that his company's new artificial intelligence models would push the frontier in the next year so. Now Mr. Zuckerberg, who has invested billions in the AI race, appears increasingly unlikely to hit that deadline, three people with knowledge of the matter said. Meta's new foundational AI model, which the company has been working on for months, has fallen short of the performance of leading AI models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on internal tests for reasoning, coding and writing, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential matters. The model, codenamed Avocado, outperformed Meta's previous AI model and did better than Google's Gemini 2.5 model from March, two of the people said. But it has not performed as strongly as Gemini 3.0 from November, they said. As a result, Meta has delayed Avocado's release to at least May from this month, the people said. They added that the leaders of Meta's AI division had instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company's AI products, though no decisions have been reached. How Meta's AI model performs is being closely watched in the competition over the fast evolving technology. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are widely regarded as ahead in foundational AI models, which are the basis for developing new chatbots, video generators, coding tools and other products. Being at the forefront of AI development also helps companies recruit technologists and keep up a stream of experimentation. It takes time to improve AI models, and Meta can still catch up to rivals, AI experts said, but a longer timeline has set in at the company, with Mr. Zuckerberg tempering expectations for Avocado in the past few months. I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly will show the rapid trajectory we're on, he said on a call with investors in January. Zuckerberg bet big on new AI models after Meta's previous model Llama 4 fell short of expectations last year. To prevent further setbacks, the company invested $4.3 billion in the startup scale A.I. in June and made its chief executive, Alexander Wang, 29, its new chief A.I. officer. Over the summer, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Wang leaned toward making Meta's new model closed, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Wang has also clashed with Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer, and Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer, over how the new AI model should improve the company's advertising business. Last week, Meta said in a note to employees, which was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal, that it would create an AI engineering team under Mr. Bosworth that would collaborate with Mr. Wang and the AI division. Rumors soon swirled that Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Wang were on the outs. Meta moved quickly to squelch the talk, with a spokesman calling the idea totally false on threads. On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg posted a selfie of him and Mr. Wang with the caption Meanwhile at Meta H, Meta's leaders are already thinking big about future AI models. Its next one will be named after an even larger fruit, watermelon. End quote. That social media addiction trial is winding down, so we might have some headlines there soon, quoting the Associated Press Closing statements in the trial began Thursday at the Spring Street Courthouse in Los Angeles. Lawyers representing the plaintiff, a 20 year old woman, and those representing the two defendants, Meta and Google owned YouTube, made their respective cases to the jurors. TikTok and Snap were also named defendants in the lawsuit, but they each settled before the trial began. The case, along with two others, has been selected as a bellwether trial, meaning its outcome could impact how thousands of similar lawsuits against social media companies are likely to play out. Jurors will begin deliberations Friday morning. The plaintiff, identified as KGM in Documents, or Caylee, as her lawyers have called her during the trial, says her early use of social media addicted her to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. Throughout the trial, Meta argued that Kaylee faced significant challenges before she ever used social media. The jury's only task, a Meta spokesperson said in a statement Thursday, is to decide if those struggles would have existed without Instagram. Not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause, end quote. Louis Lee, an attorney representing YouTube, emphasized that when Kaylee and her mother went through the process to file this lawsuit, they originally did not bring any claims against YouTube. Kaylee was an adult when they filed the case and attested under oath that she did not have any claims specifically against the video platform. Lee also spoke about how the company had created goals several years ago related to respecting users time, attention and overall well being. Both he and another executive also outlined specific safety features and guardrails the respective platforms have available for people to monitor and customize their use. Lee said Kaylee and her family did not use YouTube Kids its Safety Mode or any of their other available tools. Jurors must decide If Meta and YouTube's negligence was a substantial factor in causing Caylee's harm, but it does not have to be the only factor. Since it is a civil case, only nine out of the 12 jurors have to agree on each count. They will decide the case against each platform independently, and the judge advised them to treat it as if it were a separate lawsuit. Jurors will also decide the amount of damages Caylee should be awarded in the event they find either or both of the platforms liable. Lanier advised them to think of one question as they potentially decide on that amount what is a lost childhood worth? End quote. All the streaming video apps are all becoming just like all the others Peacock has added a new feature to its app that uses AI to curate personalized vertical video playlists narrated by a generative AI avatar of host Andy Cohen. Quoting TechCrunch based on what the streamer previewed at a press event yesterday, Peacock's mobile app is about to look a lot more like a mix of TikTok, a casual gaming hub, and a streaming Service from an AI powered BravoVerse vertical video experience narrated by a digital avatar of TV host Andy Cohen to vertical live NBA broadcasts and mobile games. Peacock is rolling out several new features designed to keep viewers entertained on their phones even longer. The biggest reveal was a new feature called you'd bravoverse, aimed at viewers deeply immersed in Bravo fandom, Home to addictive reality franchises like the Real Housewives and Vanderpump Rules. The feature pulls short form clips from more than 5,000 hours of Bravo footage and stitches them into personalized playlists. The best part, arguably, is that your guide will be a generative AI avatar of Andy Cohen, the famous reunion host for the Real Housewives franchise. Users will start the experience by selecting their favorite Bravo shows and iconic moments. From there, AI builds a personalized stream of clips. Then Cohen's avatar acts as the narrator, introducing moments, connecting storylines, and even surfacing new shows viewers might not have watched yet. Behind the scenes, Peacock says the system uses computer vision to identify key storylines and moments across its library. AI agents trained on Bravo fan behavior help determine what viewers care about most. While the platform stitches clips together across seasons and franchises, the result, according to Peacock, is more than 600 billion possible viewing variations. End Quote and Disney is rolling out Verts, its new short form video feed, to US Users on its mobile app featuring clips from movies and TV shows on Disney. Quoting a different TechCrunch piece following the success of TikTok and Instagram Reels, Vertz is designed to boost daily engagement and reach mobile first viewers, all while increasing discovery across Disney's catalog. Users will be able to access the feed through a new icon in the app's navigation bar. As users swipe through the feed, they can add shows to their watchlist or jump directly into the show or movie. While Vertz is starting as a way to showcase clips from content on Disney, the company says it will eventually feature content from creators that reflects our fandoms, plus other storytelling formats across types and personalized experiences. Disney says early testing in August on both Disney and ESPN showed that Vertz drove additional engagement. The company believes this engagement can be attributed to its advanced algorithm that powers the recommendation engine for Verts, making content personalized to each user. Disney's investment in the algorithm for Verts makes sense, as TikTok's success can be attributed to the effectiveness of its recommendation algorithm. Disney isn't the first streamer to explore vertical video, as Netflix launched a vertical feed last year that lets users scroll through clips from its original titles. By introducing short form video content, Disney and Netflix are targeting younger users who are accustomed to watching quick clips on their phones rather than long form content like TV shows and movies. If they can capture a user's interest, there's a chance that they will go on to watch the full TV show or movie that initially hook them. End quote. In the long reads. Today, another essay on AI that makes an interesting point. You know how you hear all the time that ATMs when they came out didn't kill the job of bank tellers? Well, this piece from David Ox says while that is true, it avoids the fact that the iPhone did end up killing the bank teller sector. By the 2000 and tens, people had begun to notice that there had been no mass unemployment of bank tellers. But there was an ironic element to that. At the exact moment that people started talking about how technology had not displaced bank tellers, it stopped being True. In the 2010s, bank teller employment entered a period of prolonged decline. This was not a product of the financial crisis that peaked in 2008. Bank teller employment was roughly the same in 2010 as it had been in 2007. And the decline was not rap, but gradual. It continued even as the banks returned to full health as the Great recession abated. First there was a severe decline that started after 2010, then a slight recovery at the end of the decade, and then a collapse during the COVID years from which bank teller employment has never recovered. In 2010, there were 332,000 full time bank tellers in the United States. By 2016, there were 235,000. By 2022, there were just 164,000. This was not a long delayed ATM shock. The ATM had reached full saturation long before. It was rather the effect of another technology, One that had nothing to do with banking. It was a product of the iPhone, which enabled mobile banking. The rise of mobile banking removed any real reason to have bank branches. Visits to bank branches declined dramatically throughout the 2010s, and banks aggressively redesigned the banking experience around the digital interface. The number of commercial bank branches per capita peaked in 2009 and has fallen by nearly 30% since, with most of the decline occurring in wealthier areas that were more likely to adopt digital banking first. Between 2008 and 2025, bank of America, which at some point surpassed Citibank as the second largest deposit bank in the United States after chase, closed about 40% of its branches. Online banking had been around since the 1990s, bank of America's CEO said, but the iPhone was a game changer that effectively allowed customers to carry a bank branch in their pockets. And so as the bank branches disappeared, so did the tellers. The ATM had been an innovation within the existing world of physical banking, and thus its replacement of the bank teller could inevitably only be partial. As long as people were still visiting the bank branch, it was useful to repurpose tellers as relationship bankers. But when branch visits declined, that stopped making sense. The iPhone represented a wholly different way of banking, and within it, there was no real need for the bank teller. And so a large institution like bank of America was able to reduce its headcount from 288,000 in 2010 to 204,000 in 2018. The lesson is worth stating plainly. The ATM tried to do the teller's job better, faster, cheaper. It tried to fit capital into a labor shaped hole. But the iPhone made the teller's job irrelevant. One automated tasks within an existing paradigm, and the other created a new paradigm in which those tasks simply didn't need to exist at all. And it is paradigm replacement, not task automation, that actually displaces workers and conversely unlocks the latent productivity within any technology. That's because as long as the old paradigm persists, there will be labor shaped holes in which capital substitution will encounter constant frictions and bottlenecks. This has, I think, serious implications for how we're thinking about AI. People in AI frequently talk about the vision of AI being a drop in remote worker AI systems that can be inserted into a workflow, learn it, and eventually it on the level of a competent human. And they see that as the point where you'll start to see serious productivity gains and labor displacement. I am not a denier on the question of technological job loss, but I'm skeptical that simply slotting AI into human shaped jobs will have the results people seem to expect. The history of technology, even exceptionally powerful general purpose technology, tells us that as long as you are trying to fit capital into labor shaped holes, you will find yourself confronted by endless frictions. Just as with electricity, the productivity inherent in any technology is unleashed only when you figure out how to organize work around it, rather than slotting it into what already exists. We are still very much in the regime of slotting it in, and as long as we are in that regime, I expect disappointing productivity gains and relatively little real displacement. The real productivity gains from AI and the real threat of labor displacement will come not from the drop in remote worker, but from something like Dwarkish Patel's vision of the fully automated firm. At some point in the life of every technology, old workflows are replaced by new ones, and we discover the paradigms in which the full productive force of a technology can be best expressed. In the past, this has simply been a fact of managerial turnover or depreciation cycles. But with AI, it will likely be the sheer power of the technology itself, which is really wholly unlike anything that has come before. And unlike electricity or the steam engine, will eventually be able to build the structures that harness its powers. By itself, I don't think we've really yet learned what those new structures will look like, but at the limit. I don't quite know why humans have to be involved in those, though. I expect that by the time we're dealing with the fully automated organizations of the future, our current set of concerns will have been largely outmoded by new and quite foreign ones, as has always been the case with human progress. But however optimistic I might be about the human future, I don't think it's worth leaning on the history of past technologies for comfort. The ATM parable is a comforting story, and in times of uncertainty and fear, we search naturally for solace and comfort, comfort wherever it may come. But even when it comes to bank tellers, it's only the first half of the story. End quote. That was from David Ox's blog, but this piece is from Joel Morris's substack. It asks the question, why, in a pub right off of Trafalgar Square in London, is there a painted picture of the actor James Mason holding a cat inside the caves of Lescaux? This is one of those delightful digital era detective stories that is just so much fun to unravel. No bonus content for you this weekend. Talk to you on Monday.