Zuckerberg’s AI Glasses Flop During Live Demo

Mark Zuckerberg’s big moment turned into a big embarrassment.

At the highly anticipated Connect 2025 keynote held at Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters, Zuckerberg took the stage to showcase Meta’s new flagship wearable the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, powered by AI. Priced at $799, the glasses are pitched as a leap forward in “agentic AI,” capable of acting on users’ behalf through integrated voice and gesture commands.

Instead, what the audience saw was a live demo meltdown not once, but twice.

In the first flop, cooking influencer Jack Mancuso joined Zuckerberg onstage to test out the LiveAI recipe assistant, meant to walk users step-by-step through cooking instructions. But the glasses didn’t cooperate.

When Mancuso asked the glasses, “What do I do first?”, the AI system stuttered, skipped ahead, and became visibly confused.

Even tech journalist Lance Ulanoff from Tech Radar described it as painful to watch:

“The AI was clearly confused and jumping around.”

After several failed attempts, Mancuso blamed the Wi-Fi before awkwardly ending the segment and tossing it back to Zuckerberg. But the issues didn’t stop there.

In a second attempt to win over the crowd, Zuckerberg demonstrated a WhatsApp video call feature using Meta’s Neural Band, a wrist device designed to interact with the glasses. He successfully sent a text but when Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth tried to video call him, the glasses failed to register the call.

Zuckerberg fumbled, tapped, and tried to revive the connection before ultimately giving up. Bosworth had to walk onstage and jokingly blame the “brutal Wi-Fi”, earning nervous laughter from the crowd.

Zuckerberg tried to laugh it off:

“You practice these things like a hundred times, and then you never know what’s gonna happen.”

But the damage was done.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display is part of the company's broader push into AI-driven wearables, and this was meant to be its grand unveiling. Instead, it became a prime example of why Apple and other Big Tech players have ditched live demos altogether, opting instead for pre-recorded showcases where everything is tightly controlled.

As Ulanoff noted:

“Apple no longer does live presentations at their keynotes for this reason. Tim Cook comes out, waves, and then disappears behind the curtain while a flawless video rolls.”

Meta has poured billions into AI and wearable tech as part of its pivot away from the floundering Metaverse project. These glasses were supposed to signal a new chapter: real-world applications, real-time convenience, and a polished product ready for mass adoption.

Instead, viewers were left wondering if they were watching a beta test and questioning why anyone would spend $799 on glasses that can’t answer a simple question or pick up a call.

Zuckerberg remains optimistic, insisting the glasses represent a new era of AI-powered convenience and “anticipatory computing.” But Wednesday’s blunder reminded everyone that even the most hyped tech still has to work when it matters most.

In Silicon Valley, demos are supposed to wow not whimper.

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