Mark Zuckerberg's MetaConnect 2025 keynote on Wednesday quickly turned into a humiliating experience.
The company's demos of its new artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses failed repeatedly, causing Zuckerberg to stammer his way through awkward silences.
"This is, uh... it happens," the CEO stammered after his smart glasses refused to accept a WhatsApp video call on stage. "Let's try it again, I keep messing this up."
Another demo involved content creator and amateur chef Jack Mancuso trying to get assistance from his AI glasses while cooking up a steak sauce. But the segment devolved into confusion as the "Live AI" feature assumed he was far more along in the process than he actually was, the kind of hallucination you'd expect from an AI assistant.
"You already combined the base ingredients," the AI told Mancuso, who was sheepishly standing in front of an empty glass bowl.
It was an embarrassing display, highlighting some glaring shortcomings with the company's efforts to infuse its Ray-Ban smart glasses with a heavy dose of AI.
Afterward, in an ask-me-anything on Instagram, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth explained what went wrong, insisting that it was a "demo fail, not a product fail."
"When the chef said, 'Hey Meta, start Live AI,' it started every single Ray-Ban Meta's Live AI in the building," he said. "And there was a lot of people in that building."
"That obviously didn't happen in rehearsal," Bosworth said. "We didn't have as many things."
It wasn't the only major blunder Meta encountered during its keynote.
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