Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Remember Llama? Meta spent years championing open-source as the future of AI, now it's betting on the opposite. The company is building Avocado, a closed model launching next spring that customers will pay to use.
After Llama 4 disappointed and 600 jobs were cut, Zuckerberg is personally leading the pivot alongside new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.
In today's recap:
Meta abandons open-source for paid model
Google tests AI overviews for publishers
McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash
4 new AI tools and more
META
Meta pivots from free to paid AI model
Source: Bloomberg
Recaply: Meta is shifting to a closed, paid AI model called Avocado, launching next spring, according to Bloomberg. This marks the company's biggest departure from the open-source strategy it has championed for years.
Key details:
The model will be tightly controlled and sold for access, aligning with how Google and OpenAI monetize their AI, with new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang advocating for the closed approach.
Avocado is being trained using third-party models including Google's Gemma, OpenAI's gpt-oss, and Alibaba's Qwen, distilling capabilities from rivals into Meta's system.
Bloomberg said some employees were directed to stop talking publicly about open-source and Llama products after the Llama 4 launch "while the company recalibrated" strategy.
The shift follows Llama 4's disappointing reception, with Meta eliminating 600 jobs from its AI unit in October and Yann LeCun leaving a month later.
Why it matters: After years of championing open-source as the path to AI dominance, Meta is now betting on the opposite approach with Avocado. The company sees closed models as the revenue stream needed to justify $600 billion in AI infrastructure spending. But pivoting strategy after Llama 4 flopped, employee exits mounted, and Wall Street pressure intensified doesn't exactly signal confidence in the new direction.
Google pilots new AI program for publishers
Source: Google
Recaply: Google is piloting a new commercial AI partnership program with publishers, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Der Spiegel. The program tests AI-powered article overviews and audio briefings in Google News.
Key details:
The program experiments with AI features on participating publishers' Google News pages, including article overviews that give context before clicks and audio briefings for users who prefer listening.
Google partnered with over 3,000 publications across more than 50 countries in recent years, paying for extended display rights and content delivery through APIs.
The company also partners with news services like The Associated Press, Estadão, Antara and Yonhap to include real-time information in Gemini app results.
Features will include clear attribution and link to articles, with the pilot launching now and expanding to more publishers as Google tests what drives engaged audiences.
Why it matters: AI for news has been a contentious issue over the past year, with publishers suing over training data while simultaneously negotiating licensing deals. Google's new program attempts to position AI as a discovery tool that drives traffic rather than replaces it, but whether overviews encourage clicks or satisfy curiosity without visits determines if this helps publishers or further erodes their direct audience relationships.
BRANDS & AI
McDonald's pulls AI Christmas ad after backlash
Source: McDonald's
Recaply: McDonald's Netherlands removed an AI-generated Christmas ad three days after release. Viewers called the 45-second film "creepy" and criticized the displacement of actors and crew.
Key details:
The ad was created using generative AI by Dutch agency TBWANeboko and US production company The Sweetshop, released publicly on December 6 and taken down December 9.
Production took seven weeks with "thousands of takes" edited together, as generative AI clips typically run six to 10 seconds before distorting, requiring many stitched segments.
Social media users denounced the uncanny-looking characters and poor editing, with one Instagram comment noting "no actors, no camera team...welcome to the future of filmmaking. And it sucks."
McDonald's Netherlands said the moment serves as "an important learning as we explore the effective use of AI" in a statement following the removal.
Why it matters: A "Cameo" platform for AI ads has felt like an inevitability, and McDonald's became the latest brand to test whether speed and cost savings justify the creative tradeoffs. With companies like Coca-Cola seeing mixed reactions to AI Christmas campaigns and Valentino facing "cheap" and "lazy" criticism, the backlash shows audiences can tell the difference. If major brands keep experimenting despite negative response, the issue isn't technical quality but whether saving production costs matters more than brand perception.
NEWS
Beyond the big stories in AI today
Google Labs launched animation in Pomelli powered by Veo 3.1 model, available free in US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Google updated Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro TTS models with enhanced expressivity, context-aware pacing, and multilingual multi-speaker capabilities across 24 languages.
Anthropic released Claude Code CLI upgrades with async subagents for background tasks, instant compacting, custom session names, and usage stats visualization.
Google Cloud launched fully-managed remote MCP servers for AI agents, starting with Maps, BigQuery, Compute Engine, and Kubernetes integrations.
Adobe brought Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat to ChatGPT for 800 million weekly users, offering free photo editing and PDF tools.
Google launched AI Plus plan in India at ₹199 ($2.21) monthly for six months, competing with OpenAI's ChatGPT Go pricing.
Spotify unveiled Prompted Playlists letting Premium users type exact listening preferences, using full listening history to create personalized playlists.
Amazon announced $35 billion investment in India by 2030 to advance AI innovation, targeting 15 million small businesses and 3.8 million jobs.
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