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.
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.”
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta AI glasses demo failed in EPIC fashion today 🤣pic.twitter.com/O0UFeoCar7
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) September 18, 2025
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
Photos credit: Will Oliver/POOL via CNP/INSTARimages.com, screenshots via YouTube
Serves him right. Bad wi-fi, my ass.
Wi-fi? Come on it’s not like they were using the Holiday inn free Wi-Fi. Zuckerberg’s problem is that everyone treats him like a tech genius instead of someone that stole someone else’s good idea and got rich off of it. It’s why everything that he has introduced organically outside of Facebook and haven’t purchased that already existed under some other umbrella has failed.
Much like Elon he’s not an actual innovator, he’s good at seeing someone else’s innovations and saying I can buy that and get rich from it. People have gotten wise to the both of them though and don’t want to lose their legacy so they’re finding it harder to create original, successful ideas.
Elon is also good at getting the government to pony up for almost all of his projects. That kind of grift is probably his real “genius”
Elon is the biggest Corporate Welfare Kween
Thank you Dee(2) for my morning laugh! “it’s not like they were using the Holiday inn free Wi-Fi”. I just spent the weekend in a hotel for a quick work trip with my partner and family and it really hit home! As if Zuck and his team didn’t have a dedicated Wifi for those damn glasses!
Honestly? From stealing the idea for Facebook, for calling people who turned over their personal information to him “dumb fucks,” to dismantling safeguards for online lying, ending DEI at his company and cozying up to a dictator even when he has the resources even just to distance himself–he deserves every bad thing that happens to him.
Love this for him. Hope his AI investments fail just like everyone else’s. The only people making money from AI are the ones selling it to all these idiots.
I have the gen 1 version of these glasses. I love using them to listen to podcasts while I walk my dog and take pictures or video of my kids when they are doing active stuff like climbing trees or dancing. So far the AI upgrades have been big misses. I tried to use it for translating words or phrases, general info questions, and even having a conversation with me. It steps on its own toes most of the time. The core functions, camera and over-ear speakers, are great. The AI is trying too hard for something that’s not ready.
I heard a discussion about ppl with the meta glasses talking about how useful they were on Sirius radio. Now the “new hotness” is worse than the “old and busted?”🙄looks like Zuckerberg’s karma tainted what could be really useful glasses.
I mean since we are boycotting companies that bend the knee to authoritarians… why are people still using and spending money on Meta products?
I highly recommend the book “Careless People” by a former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams. It won’t be anything that you don’t suspect but it is still enlightening in just how far these people will go to look successful.
AGREE — very good read, not super-surprising, but they really are terrible, greedy people who have no sense of self. For some reason the anecdote about Mark forgetting his passport before an important international trip and hoping that he somehow would be able to finesse not having it really sticks with me. They don’t think they’re ordinary mortals.
YES! Came here to say this too. I have several chapters left and I’m just disgusted. I’ve realized that anything positive that I ever attributed to facebook was a mistake and a fluke and a by-product of their attempt to capture the world.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy lmao
Love this for him.
I would love, LOVE to see a LooneyTunes style situation where the glasses shock him unconscious, with zany music and laughing from the audience. Like all these thin-skinned manbabies, it would crush his soul and he deserves that.
F*ck Zuck. He can keep his stupid glasses.
I also like written instructions for my cooking and can’t imagine following a recipe this way. I don’t mind being guided by someone who’s in the room, but if I’m alone I want to read, not listen. It can be on my phone or laptop so long as it’s in writing. I love cookbooks and own many vintage ones but rarely use them anymore, I admit.
Anyway, what a hilarious fail. I didn’t use to mind Zuck so much but now I think he’s a putz.
My question, is anyone really asking for AI glasses? Other than sleazy pasty tech bros who think they are cool because they dream of a day that such glasses will let them see through women’s clothing, like the X-Ray Spex advertised in the back pages of comic books in the 1970s?
My other thought was how frickin rude and like a man was that chef when he freakin interrupted the female AI voice while she tried to explain the recipe. I’d like to think the AI got pissed at interrupter-boy and that’s why she refused to tell him the first step of the process.
😍
LOL
Is that enough masculine energy for you, Zuck?
Really funny 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣