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Exclusive By Charles Rollet You're currently following this author! Click to unsubscribe from email alerts. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP via Getty Images Meta is done with fruits. The social media giant has internally decided to stop naming its AI models after fruit, a person familiar with the matter said. It's largely a branding decision, as fruit-based codenames don't chime well with Meta's lofty AI ambitions, the person added.
"Watermelon" was the internal codename for Meta's latest AI, Wonder Full , which Meta said was its first cutting-edge "frontier" model. Meta teased its launch by posting photos of the fruit. Meta dubbed its previous language and image models "Avocado" and "Mango," respectively.
Meta declined to comment. Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and AI chief, Alexandr Wang, joked on the Cheeky Pint podcast last month that they've run out of fruit names for their AI. "We're out of fruits," Zuckerberg said.
"So we're going to have to switch to a new convention." "I think the only fruit that is technically larger is the durian, and you don't want to go to the durian," Wang said. Meta isn't the only tech company to name its AI products after items you can buy in a grocery store. In 2025, OpenAI dubbed one model "Garlic" internally, The Information reported.
Google also released its "Nano Banana" image generator in 2025. More recently, as AI models get more powerful, it's become trendy to give them more awe-inspiring names, like Anthropic's Mythos or OpenAI's Astra. Have a tip?
Contact this reporter securely on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. Read next Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Charles Rollet You're currently following this author!
Click to unsubscribe from email alerts. Charles Rollet is Business Insider's tech correspondent in San Francisco, where he focuses on breaking major news about the AI industry. In 2025, he led an investigation which revealed that Scale AI had inadvertently exposed confidential data about its workers and clients.
In 2026, he was the first to break the news that Meta had halted a controversial keystroke tracking program. Prior to joining BI, Charles worked at TechCrunch covering startups and VC in San Francisco. Before that, he was based in Southeast Asia for a decade, where his work won a Gerald Loeb award and was nominated for a Society of Publishers in Asia award.
His reporting on the surveillance industry led to US human rights sanctions on five Chinese security camera manufacturers. Charles is especially interested in how frontier AI models are built and trained. He has a master's degree in business reporting from NYU and a bachelor's degree in history from Northwestern.
You can contact Charles securely on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811. Charles keeps sources anonymous. Please use a non-work device to reach out.
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