Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta AI glasses failed multiple times in front of a live audience


Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been having a good month of PR, and it couldn’t be happening to a better tech billionaire. First The New York Times ran a deep dive on the Meta CEO’s destructive takeover of an historic neighborhood in Palo Alto, all so he can build a mega compound (one of at least two he has). Then Zuck paid a visit to the emperor for a White House tech summit where he was caught on a hot mic making up investment numbers for Dementia Don. And now this: Meta held its annual Connect Conference last week, and Zuck took to the stage to tout the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses (Gen 2), a collaboration with the iconic eye wear brand, of AI-equipped frames. This second generation was supposed to have optimized the “seamless discussion experience,” so instead of saying “Hey Siri” to your phone, you can say “Hey Meta” to your glasses and get immediate and entirely accurate responses from the machinery. Only, guess what didn’t work during not one but two live demonstrations?

To demonstrate the tech, Zuckerberg spoke to food influencer Jack Mancuso via video link and told the AI to help the chef whip up a “Korean-inspired” steak sauce using ingredients in the kitchen.

Business Insider reported the vision unraveled when the AI glitched moments after the request, ignoring basic instructions and insisting that the employee had “already combined these ingredients.”

Despite the confidence of all involved, things continued unraveling. “What do I do first?” Mancuso asked the AI three times, his voice growing increasingly panicked as it ignored his basic requests.

“You’ve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate the pear and gently combine it with the base sauce,” it responded twice.

The segment was abruptly cut short after the panicked employee and a visibly flustered Zuckerberg blamed the AI’s failure on “bad wifi,” a flimsy excuse met with pity cheers from the audience.

“It’s all good. You know what? It’s so good,” said Zuckerberg as he tried to get the presentation back on track. “It’s, uh, the irony of the whole thing is that you spend years making technology and then the wifi at the end of the day catches you.”

But the event descended even further into farce just moments later, when, during the next segment, Zuckerberg’s attempts to use the glasses and wristband to make a video call fell completely flat and left the CEO making feeble hand gestures and mumbling awkwardly onstage after the AI failed to connect the call on four separate occasions.

Zuckerberg was eventually bailed out when Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, whom Zuck had been attempting to make the call to, appeared on stage.

“This wifi is brutal,” he joked, eliciting nervous laughter from those in attendance.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Zuckerberg responded. “We’ll debug that later. You practice these things like 100 times, and then, you never know what’s going to happen.”

“I promise you no one is more upset about this than I am, because this is my team that now has to go debug why this didn’t work on the stage,” Bosworth added.

In addition to the cringe-factor, Wednesday’s humiliation was also a damning indictment of Zuckerberg himself, who this year took personal control of the company’s artificial intelligence division and offered new hires eye-popping salaries of up to nine figures in a desperate attempt to regain a foothold in the AI race after becoming frustrated with Meta’s relative lack of progress and several high-profile failures.

[From Daily Beast]

What a putz, blaming it on the wifi! Luckily for us, both snafus were captured on camera. When Zuck is unable to place the video call, you can practically see the cartoon steam bursting out of his head. Then the failed cooking segment, oy. The influencer, Jack Mancuso, really was panicked, and also had no sense of how to ad lib, he just kept repeating “What do I do first?” and hoping for a different result. Call me crazy, call me a curmudgeon, call me woefully behind the times… but whatever happened to cook books?! Or printing out a single recipe to follow? Granted I have a bias for analog methods, but with cooking I like to have the written directions in front of me to refer to, and I seriously doubt I would catch everything from hearing it alone. Even more especially because I tend to do more baking than cooking; only hearing measurements as opposed to seeing them would be a recipe for disaster. Sidenote: one of the most thoughtful gifts I ever got was a tea towel my aunt had printed with my grandmother’s chocolate chip cookie recipe, in my grandmother’s handwriting from the scrap of paper she wrote it down on. AI couldn’t give me that, even when it “works.”



Photos credit: Will Oliver/POOL via CNP/INSTARimages.com, screenshots via YouTube

AI, Failure, Mark Zuckerberg, Technology
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