Tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg was humiliated onstage not once, but twice, as his attempts to showcase the brilliance of Meta’s new AI-powered glasses were met with dismal failure.
Speaking at the company’s annual Meta Connect conference, Zuckerberg introduced the company’s second-generation smart Ray-Bans and a new neural wristband, as part of his vision for an AI that serves people in real-time.
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.
Sometimes, the demo just doesn’t work. At Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg’s showcase for how AI can help a chef put together a BBQ sauce came to an awkward end. pic.twitter.com/RmkRKXUyoa
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 18, 2025
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 day kind of 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.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta AI glasses demo failed in EPIC fashion today 🤣pic.twitter.com/O0UFeoCar7
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) September 18, 2025
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.
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