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.
Since Meta routed all traffic to its “dev server,” including from all of the headsets in the building, “we DDoS’d ourselves, basically,” Bosworth admitted, referring to a common cyberattack strategy known as a “denial-of-service attack” that attempts to bring a network down by overwhelming it with phony internet traffic.
Bosworth also attempted to explain why Zuckerberg’s attempt to make a WhatsApp video call using the Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses completely failed.
Apparently, it was due to a “never-before-seen bug” that Zuckerberg was unable to accept calls on his smart glasses.
“You guys know we can do video calling,” Bosworth pleaded on Instagram. “We got WhatsApp, we know how to do video calling.”
But should we really take the CTO’s excuses at face value? Besides coping with the seemingly inevitable software bugs, there’s a decent chance users of Meta’s smart glasses will also run into a plethora of hallucinations — a reality numerous AI gadget manufacturers have faced already.
In other words, instead of being lied to by an AI on a desktop computer or smartphone, Meta is opening up the possibility of having a robotic voice mislead you straight through your smart glasses as well.
Whether that kind of potential frustration is worth $379 for the regular smart glasses — and $799 for a version of the Ray-Bans with a small screen that wearers can see in their vision — remains to be seen.
On the other hand, journalists who got the opportunity to try the glasses out for themselves appear to have been surprisingly impressed by the experience. So maybe Zuckerberg’s disastrous keynote was just the result of poor planning after all.
More on the keynote: Mark Zuckerberg Humiliated as AI Glasses Debut Fails in Front of Huge Crowd
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