Meta's AI live demo goes painfully wrong in minute-long footage.
Facebook's parent company just experienced a live demo nightmare that every tech company dreads.
During yesterday's (17 September) Meta Connect 2025 livestream, the company's big reveal of its new Ray-Ban Meta glasses turned into an uncomfortable train wreck when their AI system malfunctioned at the worst possible moment.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had hyped up the company's second-generation smart glasses to 'empower people with new abilities' and allow users to 'make themselves smarter.'
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However, the live demo told a different story.
The trouble started when they switched to a livestreamed cooking demonstration, projected on a massive screen next to Zuckerberg. Chef Jack Mancuso tried to demonstrate the glasses' Live AI feature by helping out with a Korean-inspired steak sauce.
The glasses recognised the ingredients laid out in front of Mancuso and started listing what was needed for the sauce.
Mancuso interrupted the AI and asked: "What do I do first?" Then, followed silence.
Mancuso tried again: "What do I do first?"
Then the AI piped up to inform the chef of the next steps of the recipe, as the sauce base was apparently 'already made.'
After another long, uncomfortable pause, Mancuso asked the same question a third time, which got some nervous laughter from the crowd.
"You've already combined the base ingredients," the AI continued, telling him to grate a pear into the non-existent sauce.
"Alright, I think the Wi-Fi might be messed up," Mancuso added before giving the spotlight back to Zuckerberg.
The CEO tried to laugh it off with the crowd, admitting: "It's all good, it's all good," before adding: "The irony of all this whole thing is that you spend years making technology and then the Wi-Fi on the day kinda catches you. We'll go check out what he made later."
After a user shared the clip on X, social media users were quick to call out the obvious deflection.
"that was NOT the wifi," one X user wrote.
"Blaming the WiFi is craaaaaaazy," another commented.
"F***ing hell," someone else admitted. "That looked stressful. I hope they’re able to make it work eventually".
A fourth user added: "This feature is sweet but the demo was hard to watch. Hoping it was just unlucky".
Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the disaster. Later in the presentation, Zuckerberg tried to show off the glasses' ability to handle video calls through hand gestures.
While he successfully demonstrated receiving a call request via text using hand movements, he failed when it came to actually answering the call.
"Well, I… let's see what happened there. That's too bad. I don't know what happened," the billionaire tried to recover.
Despite multiple attempts, the Meta CEO was left standing on stage making finger gestures at nothing while the AI voice kept announcing incoming calls he couldn't answer.