{"id":172695,"date":"2025-09-27T11:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T11:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/172695\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T11:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T11:50:07","slug":"zuckerberg-hailed-ai-superintelligence-then-his-smart-glasses-failed-on-stage-matthew-cantor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/172695\/","title":{"rendered":"Zuckerberg hailed AI \u2018superintelligence\u2019. Then his smart glasses failed on stage | Matthew Cantor"},"content":{"rendered":"

As humanity inches closer to an AI<\/a> apocalypse, a sliver of hope remains: the robots might not work.<\/p>\n

Such was the case last week, as Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> attempted to demonstrate his company\u2019s new AI-enabled smart glasses. \u201cI don\u2019t know what to tell you guys,\u201d Zuckerberg told a crowd of Meta<\/a> enthusiasts as he tried, and failed, for roughly the fourth time to hold a video call with his colleague via the glasses.<\/p>\n

It was a limp follow-up to an ambitious opening to the event at Meta Connect 2025, a developers conference in Menlo Park, California<\/a>, where the company is headquartered. The keynote was to feature the Ray-Ban Meta Display, the latest version of what is essentially a face-mounted iPhone \u2013 ideal for the consumer who lacks the energy to pull a device from their pocket and idolizes both Buddy Holly and the Terminator. Despite that undeniable appeal, the show was a technical mess \u2013 perhaps the perfect homage to the latest pointless iteration of digital hardware.<\/p>\n

The show had a promising start. Viewers witnessed Zuck making his way to the stage to thumping music, performing an alarming number of fist bumps en route. The moment was presented onscreen through the camera on his glasses, so that the audience could see \u201cMark\u2019s POV\u201d. All the while, he was receiving a flurry of text messages expressing enthusiasm that was no doubt genuine: \u201cLet\u2019s gooo\u201d followed by a rocketship emoji, \u201caudience is getting hyped\u201d with a picture of two guys looking content at best, a gif saying \u201cIt\u2019s time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, Zuck reached the stage, in his now signature big T-shirt and curls. He explained the company\u2019s commitment to attractive eyewear, to the supremely ironic notion that \u201cthe technology needs to get out of the way\u201d of human interaction, and to \u201ctaking superintelligence seriously\u201d. Superintelligence is going to be \u201cthe most important technology of our lifetimes. AI should serve people, not just be something that sits in a data center automating large parts of society,\u201d he said, sweetly assuming that society will exist beyond the next decade.<\/p>\n

If it was all an exercise in humanizing Zuckerberg, it worked: it was easy to pity the boy wonder, 41<\/p>\n

Things rolled along smoothly enough until it came time to actually use an AI feature. Zuck held a video call with chef Jack Mancuso, suggesting he make \u201cmaybe like a steak sauce, maybe Korean-inspired type thing\u201d, which Mancuso admitted he had never made before, so he \u201ccould definitely use the help\u201d of AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do I do first?\u201d he asked the oracle.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve already combined the base ingredients,\u201d the AI informed him wrongly, \u201cso now grate a pear to add to the sauce.\u201d Long silence.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do I do first?\u201d Mancuso asked again.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate the pear and gently combine it with the base sauce,\u201d the AI patiently reminded him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the wifi might be messed up. Sorry. Back to you, Mark.\u201d (Certainly it was the wifi and not the AI itself.)<\/p>\n

To his credit, Zuckerberg remained poised. \u201cIt\u2019s all good. You know what? It\u2019s all good,\u201d he said. \u201cThe irony of the whole thing is that you spend years making technology, and then the wifi on the day kind of catches you.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI demo failures are nothing new. They are something of a tradition<\/a> at Google, where last year a presenter used its Gemini tool<\/a> to scan a Sabrina Carpenter concert poster listing her tour dates. \u201cI\u2019ll just open Gemini, take a photo, and ask: \u2018Check my calendar and see if I\u2019m free when she\u2019s coming to San Francisco this year.\u2019\u201d The bot\u2019s response was dead silence. (It finally worked on the third try, on a different device.)<\/p>\n

This year, when Google showed off a translation feature on its own smart glasses, it failed after about 15 seconds<\/a>. To be fair, just because there\u2019s an error in a high-stakes tech presentation doesn\u2019t mean a product won\u2019t work, as anyone who watched a certain Tesla Cybertruck presentation will recall. When a designer threw a metal ball at the truck\u2019s \u201carmor glass\u201d windows, it smashed them. That truck went on to a glorious future, earning the coveted title of \u201cdeadlier than a Ford Pinto<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

At this point in his presentation, you might assume Zuckerberg would leave nothing to chance. But when it came time to demonstrate the Ray-Ban Meta<\/a> Display\u2019s unique new wristband, he opted against using slides and decided to try it live.<\/p>\n

The wristband is what he called a \u201cneural interface\u201d \u2013 in a genuinely remarkable feat of technology, it allows you to type through minimal hand gestures<\/a>, picking up on the electrical signals going through your muscles. \u201cSometimes you\u2019re around other people and it\u2019s, um, good to be able to type without anyone seeing,\u201d Zuckerberg told the crowd. The pairing of glasses and wristband is, in short, a stalker\u2019s dream.<\/p>\n

At least when it works. Zuckerberg attempted to call his colleague Andrew Bosworth over and over again, the audience sitting in silence as the incoming-call music played. But the CEO was unable to pick up. \u201cThat\u2019s too bad. I don\u2019t know what happened,\u201d he said after the first failed attempt. Then came another \u2013 \u201cI\u2019m just gonna pick that up with my neural band,\u201d he said with a straight face \u2013 but again, he couldn\u2019t do it, as the \u201cmissed video call\u201d alerts stacked up on the onstage display, still showing \u201cMark\u2019s POV\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what to tell you guys, alright, but we\u2019re gonna have Boz come out here and we\u2019re just gonna go to the next thing that I wanted to show and hope that will work.\u201d A sign at the back of the room, visible onscreen, read: \u201cLive demo \u2013 good luck\u201d.<\/p>\n

If it was all an exercise in humanizing Zuckerberg, it worked: it was easy to pity the boy wonder, 41, as he fidgeted with the controls and did his best to smile through it all.<\/p>\n

But the event as a whole felt like an out-of-touch millennial nightmare, a surreal relic of early 2000s optimism that only a cloistered Silicon Valley billionaire could embrace. The fanfare was reminiscent of Steve Jobs\u2019 unveiling of the iPhone in 2007, with two big differences: back then, the US wasn\u2019t collapsing offstage \u2013 at least not so obviously \u2013 and meanwhile, it was abundantly clear why a person might actually desire the device being announced. It was the internet! In your pocket! When could we get our hands on this marvel of human ingenuity?<\/p>\n

This event \u2013 and much of the AI push, as generative tools are crowbarred into hardware and software that appeared to work fine without it \u2013 wants to harness the same energy without a remotely comparable product.<\/p>\n

To a layperson, at least, it seems that consumer technology has long since entered an era of solutions in search of problems \u2013 particularly troubling at a time when the world is facing so many genuinely intractable crises. As entertaining as it is to watch our tech overlords flounder on stage, it raises bigger questions, such as: who exactly asked for this, beyond the billionaires cashing in? And: can we just not?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As humanity inches closer to an AI apocalypse, a sliver of hope remains: the robots might not work.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-172695","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}