If you were watching Meta’s Connect conference this week, you saw some live tech demo going spectacularly off the rails. The kind where you half-watch from behind your fingers. The grand unveiling of its new AI-powered smart glasses was supposed to be a mic-drop moment. Instead, what actually happened became an instant headline for all the wrong reasons, with presenters repeatedly asking the glasses for help, only to be met with dead air and a whole lot of nothing.
The first hiccup came during a cooking demo. Influencer Jack Mancuso tried to follow step-by-step guidance from the glasses to whip up a Korean-inspired steak sauce. Instead, the AI assistant went haywire and gave instructions out of order, creating a confusing mess rather than culinary magic.
The immediate, easy guess? Spotty Wi-Fi. It’s the classic scapegoat for every failed live demo since the dawn of the internet. But Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, isn’t going with the easy answer. In a candid series of explanations on Instagram, he detailed the actual, far more interesting cascade of failures that led to the on-stage silence (via Engadget).
When smart glasses get too smart for their own good
Behind the scenes, the glitch stemmed from what appeared to be a resource overload. Activating the Live AI feature didn’t just pull information for one device but instead triggered every paired pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses in the building, overwhelming the system. As if that wasn’t enough, a rare bug caused the heads-up display to go dark during a follow-up live video call demo. When Zuckerberg tried to connect with Bosworth, the call didn’t show up, leaving him visibly frustrated and apologetic in front of the crowd.
Bosworth described the incident as a kind of self-inflicted DDoS, joking that the company had essentially jammed its own network with too many requests at once. He noted the rare video bug that put the display to sleep mid-call is now fixed, but the fiasco underscored just how challenging real-world AI-powered AR can be.
Despite the demo hiccups, Bosworth stressed that the smart glasses themselves are fully functional. The demo glitches were just backend hiccups: the kind of complex, early-stage tech integration problems that happen when you’re building something new. It’s a blunt reminder: even with massive resources, developing AI-powered AR is hard, and unexpected bugs are part of the process.
