Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news, and analysis.

Good afternoon. Today is Tuesday, December 9th, and I'm your host, Kim Con.

Our top story so far, it looks like the time is ripe for avocado.

Meta Platforms is preparing to launch a new large-language model in early

2026 as it ramps up competition with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

That's according to CNBC.

The model, codenamed avocado, is viewed internally as the successor to Lama.

Unlike Lama, which meta-open-sourced, avocado is expected to be proprietary,

making a significant strategic shift after months of internal debate

over whether Lama was falling behind rival systems.

Back in June, met executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg,

discussed de-investing in Lama in favor of more advanced external models.

Two months later, the company reorganized its AI division to speed product development

and better position itself in the generative AI race.

Meta has also been expanding its AI bench.

This summer, it paid nearly $15 billion for stake in scale AI and named CEO Alexander Wong

as Meta's chief AI officer.

Also in the AI space, OpenAI's chat

GPT continues to reach new milestones with a number of weekly active users reaching 900 million,

which represents an increase of 100 million in less than two months, according to the

information. Among active stocks, Home Depot is under pressure after issuing preliminary

2026 outlook that

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