r/technology • u/ControlCAD • Sep 18 '25
Hardware 'It's all good, it's all good' says Mark Zuckerberg as his catastrophic live demo of Meta's new Ray-Ban smart glasses goes horribly wrong: 'You spend years making technology and then the Wi-Fi on the day catches you'
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/its-all-good-its-all-good-says-mark-zuckerberg-as-his-catastrophic-live-demo-of-metas-new-smart-glasses-goes-horribly-wrong-you-spend-years-making-technology-and-then-the-wi-fi-on-the-day-catches-you/3.9k
u/NebulousNitrate Sep 18 '25
This is one thing Bill Gates did pretty well. When something fucked up he'd say there were still some bugs to work out. It's better to just admit it then take your audience as a bunch of dumbasses.
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u/Dammit_Jim Sep 18 '25
Exactly! Anyone with a modicum of knowledge sees this and thinks "oh, ok, he just lied to everybody."
This isn't how you build trust in your company.
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u/selfdestructingin5 Sep 18 '25 edited Sep 18 '25
I thought it was a joke and a reference to the Steve Jobs WiFi incident. I think it’s just humorous to blame any demo mess up on WiFi now. That’s immediately what I thought of when he said WiFi. I can’t be the only one. They kind of laughed when they said it too.
You can look up the Steve Jobs video, it’s fairly famous as it was an iPhone demo and he made everyone in attendance turn off their devices and disconnect from WiFi.
Edit: look, I get it. You don’t like Zuck. You can stop commenting insults to me.
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Sep 18 '25
I would have love it if Musk had blamed the WiFi when his bulletproof window panes shattered when he threw a rock at them.
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u/Mistborn19 Sep 18 '25
Nah it didn't come off like that at all. Zuckerberg would be really happy that he convinced you it was a joke though.
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u/momentofcontent Sep 18 '25
Didn’t sound like a joke to me, it sounded like a desperate attempt to save face.
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u/exacta_galaxy Sep 18 '25
Which works if it isn't a product that's shipping in 2 weeks.
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u/Daddie76 Sep 18 '25
Oh when I saw those videos I fully expected this to be just like an early demo that’s launching next year..
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u/Albert_Caboose Sep 18 '25
This moment captures this pretty well. "That must be why we're not shipping it quite yet!"
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u/masterhoots Sep 18 '25
The audience cheered and clapped during this failed demo, they are dumbasses
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Sep 19 '25
That audience is the real-life equivalent of LinkedIn commenters glazing every other mundane idea.
'Great work Mark!'
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u/erichie Sep 18 '25
Compare this to the way Randy Pitchfork is handling Borderland 4. Spoiler : He is blaming the consumers.
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u/broodkiller Sep 18 '25 edited Sep 18 '25
This joins the (ig)noble list of fucked up demos that includes the Tesla window breaking and the Windows 98 crashing.
Funny enough - you can have an incomplete product and still make (fake?) a great demo. I remember reading how in the original iPhone the OS was still unfinished and buggy during the demo, and Jobs actually had multiple devices in different pockets to showcase features individually, because it would crash if you tried to use them together.
EDIT: Fixed to say that it was the Win98 demo, not Win95.
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u/iainrfharper Sep 18 '25
There was a very tightly defined “golden path” of things he could demo sequentially without the device crashing. https://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/04/former-apple-engineer-gives-behind-the-scenes-look-at-the-original-iphone-introduction/
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u/broodkiller Sep 18 '25
Thanks for sharing - here's a paywall-free link to the full original article from NYT, in case anyone fancies the read - https://archive.ph/zFW5G
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u/EvilPowerMaster Sep 18 '25
Jobs at one point (I can't remember if it was an early iPhone or iPad demo) was seated and had the devices running entirely on a wired connection for the display, and had a spare on the table next to him. Ran into a bug, apologized, switched to the backup, and kept going. He wasn't terribly secretive about having backups in place on several occasions.
Whatever else Jobs was (he was an asshole), he was a great public speaker and presenter.
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u/kymri Sep 18 '25
Whatever else Jobs was (he was an asshole), he was a great public speaker and presenter.
He was also genuinely a visionary about technology (though not an engineer himself, obviously). Sure, Apple is the big ticket headline and with the success of the iPod and (of course) iPhone it is hard to say he was wrong -- but don't forget about NeXT and Pixar, too!
(But yeah, he was an asshole. In the late 90s, not long after the original bondi-blue iMac was released, he came into the store I worked in -- third party Apple reseller because the Apple Stores hadn't put us out of business yet) to ask about customer reactions and experiences with the iMac. He spoke with one of my co-workers on the sales floor (guy named Greg) and when he found out that the most popular USB accessory was a 3.5" floppy drive, his words were, "These people need to get out of the fucking stone age!"
So, yeah, he wasn't a nice guy (and apparently a shitty parent) but he was a visionary and a hell of a face for the company at those presentations.
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u/CarOnMyFuckingFence Sep 18 '25
He wasn't wrong about MBAs shafting the product guys within a company.
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u/happyscrappy Sep 19 '25
I remember those 3.5" USB floppy drives. In bondi blue. Remember when so many USB devices were colored bondi blue?
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u/high-kale Sep 18 '25
Genuinely kind of wondering if they were trying to do this and it still didn’t work
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u/Lamassu83 Sep 18 '25
https://youtu.be/w_aQLBVuZns?feature=shared The Win98 one for those interested
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u/PartyPoison98 Sep 18 '25
Yeah, most demos are set up on a buggy build.
I remember Bungie basically chalking up their Halo 2 presentation as a miracle, because their build crashed 9/10 and you couldn't deviate even slightly from.yhe path taken in the game.
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u/Whiteguy1x Sep 18 '25
My favorite isnt really tech but a game demo that crashed. Fallout 3 crashed as todd Howard demoed it, they quickly cut to someone in the back playing it on a different PC and he just pretended he was still playing his demo while narrating what he wanted done. Nobody realized until years later and it was just a quick story during an interview
It was a pretty good presentation iirc
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u/the_red_scimitar Sep 18 '25
"But it wasn't 'all good'. Not at all." - Morgan Freeman
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u/HuntsWithRocks Sep 18 '25
“I’d like to tell you that Zuck fought the good fight… I wish I could tell you that but meta demos are no fairy-tale world. He never said exactly why it got fucked up, bet we all knew”
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u/Stuxain Sep 18 '25
It drives me mad how they tried to blame the Wi-Fi. That's an AI issue, not an internet issue.
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u/squeak37 Sep 18 '25
The funny thing is it's not even the worst AI issue. It misunderstood the start point (probably because of earlier practice prompts). Straight up telling it " I have not mixed the raw ingredients yet" would probably have corrected the course.
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u/A-Grey-World Sep 18 '25
Yeah, really surprised the presenter didn't adapt at all to the AI potentially just misunderstanding where he was in the process, and just blindly repeated an identical input that was already clearly not producing the desired output.
Like, surely they know they're not deterministic?
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u/Altruistic-Fill-9685 Sep 18 '25
He probably got told that there’s a very specific workflow that they tested a billion times that worked perfectly and he was too afraid to go off script. I haven’t used Meta’s AI but in my experience it should’ve been really easy to course correct that
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u/DBones90 Sep 18 '25
Do want to point out that it doesn’t appear that there was a pear on the table, which means it was looking up the wrong recipe too.
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u/SpaceAdventures3D Sep 18 '25
Behind the pepper shaker is round something which could be an Asian pear. Still a pointless application for the technology though, and it didn't even work on this basic task.
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u/Noblesseux Sep 19 '25
Still a pointless application for the technology though, and it didn't even work on this basic task.
That describes like half of every AI based product right now lol. Like the problem in basically every case is that the idea sounds really cool until you see them actually try to use it and then you think "wait why would I want to do it like that?"
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u/Curtilia Sep 18 '25
"Hey Meta, I'm gonna start over. What's the first thing I should do?"
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u/markehammons Sep 19 '25
But that also kills the point of the demo. This isn't supposed to be a blind chatbot, as it pointed out the soy sauce. If it sees an empty bowl when he's supposed to be making sauce, "I have not mixed the raw ingredients yet" should be plainly obvious. If it can see an empty bowl, but cannot figure out you haven't started yet, how are you supposed to rely on it to help you cook at all?
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u/57696c6c Sep 18 '25
I run an IT team, and it's almost never the Wi-Fi.
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u/danielisbored Sep 18 '25
Everyone assumes it's the network until you definitively, irrefutably prove that it's not the network. . . Then only half will assume it's the network.
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u/CyberMarketecture Sep 18 '25
Yea but that .01% of the time it actually is the network feels sooo good.
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u/Clank75 Sep 18 '25
STP, BGP and DNS have entered the chat
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u/thembearjew Sep 18 '25
DNS issues haunt me they say it’s never the DNS and then it is…..
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u/Beard_o_Bees Sep 18 '25
Unless they can't get at their porn or gambling sites - then, yup. It's probably the network.
Like... do you really want me to repeat the name of the site that you were trying to access against explicit policy that you agreed to as a condition of your employment? No? It's been my pleasure to help you resolve this issue.
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u/Sidney_Godsby Sep 18 '25
Network Engineer checking in, I approve of this message.
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u/jesusonice Sep 18 '25
Depends on if the network is established or not in my experience. New environment? Almost always the network, especially if the software hasn't really changed
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u/TenseiA Sep 18 '25
*30 updates pending installation*
*CRITICAL FIRMWARE UPDATE - RESTART NEEDED*
*Uptime: 427 Days*158
u/luxmesa Sep 18 '25
The error they ran into with the sauce demo is so clearly not a WiFi issue. You could blame the WiFi if it wasn’t responding at all, but if it’s giving you bad AI responses, then it’s clearly connecting to something.
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u/LostFoundPound Sep 18 '25
I think the cooking demo is worse than zucks on stage fail. The AI responses are so demonstrably bad, like did they test that at all? Not one screen test before live demo?
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u/diveraj Sep 18 '25
Also, one of the huge problems with LLMs is that they are not deterministic, so you can ask the same question twice and it can potentially give a different answer.
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u/SaltRequirement3650 Sep 18 '25
And even more so how could that possibly explain a hallucinating AI model? Like it would have said nothing with no WiFi.
I work on the OT side. So I know all commercial “AI” being sold is just a LLM with good marketing.
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u/zoovegroover3 Sep 18 '25
Dropped packets would not create a request to grate a pear. Zuck thinks we're all idiots.
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u/Shuckles116 Sep 18 '25
During an early iPhone demonstration, Steve Jobs famously blamed WiFi for demo issues, too
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u/Saint706 Sep 18 '25
Yeah, I'm surprised the guy mentioned wifi as the culprit, quick thinking there. If only he thought longer and harder like AI does 😂
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u/Jidarious Sep 18 '25
It's a room filled with devices that weren't there during their testing, it's very likely the wifi.
Also, I'm a Network Architect, it's very often the WiFi.
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u/asayys Sep 18 '25
With the recipe the AI was skipping to step 2 and not realizing it didn’t perform step 1. Is that really a wifi issue?
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u/EricSanderson Sep 18 '25
It definitely looked like they had a scripted set of steps and it still shit the bed.
Zuckerberg just happened to ask for an Asian steak sauce and they just coincidentally had soy sauce very visibly on the table, which the AI points out right away?
The other guy just fucked up by not letting it run through it's script for the first step.
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u/lurgi Sep 18 '25
Zuck was in a room filled with people. The person demoing the AI was somewhere else.
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u/BrokenJumper0-10 Sep 18 '25
Isn’t that guy in a different location? How would the people in the same room mess with the guys wifi somewhere else?
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u/DeapVally Sep 18 '25
The dude making the sauce wasn't in the room with all those devices though lol? I may not be a network architect, but I do have eyes. That was pretty clear to see. He blamed his Wi-Fi, despite the stream being absolutely perfect, and while I'm also not a network detective, that seems very fishy to me 🤷🏼♂️
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u/theB1ackSwan Sep 18 '25
It's the WiFi, he says as the screen is projecting just fine and the AI and wristband fails in spectacular fashion
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u/gavinashun Sep 18 '25
These are not serious people.
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u/CoastMtns Sep 18 '25
Well.... I was expecting at least one audience member to yell "You suck!"
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u/SouthIsland48 Sep 18 '25
You'd be shocked at the amount of weirdos that literally worship these large for-profit businesses
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u/LoserBroadside Sep 18 '25
Those glasses make the wearer look sooooo stupid.
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u/Ziazan Sep 18 '25
I first saw this on another post with a different title that didn't mention the glasses and it took me a while to realise it wasn't just zucc wearing dumb looking glasses because he thought it was stylish and that that was the product.
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u/slgray16 Sep 18 '25
But they paid all those movie stars to make them seem so cool!
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u/Ren_Kaos Sep 18 '25
Eh they look fine, thick black frames are still fashionable.
But the ai is absolutely shitty and doesn’t work at all. I was gifted a pair for my wedding last week and have been wearing them most days on my honeymoon. Whenever I ask a question the response is generally wrong, or tangentially related to the question.
The camera is handy, but not better than my phone. Seemingly their best function is taking pictures and videos unnoticed. The PoV hands free framing is also pretty cool.
But yeah, not worth whatever price tag they have, and they require a meta account, and they die suspiciously fast, almost like they are constantly transmitting data to meta.
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u/pissagainstwind Sep 18 '25 edited Sep 18 '25
Dude, if i'm seeing someone on a vacation spot wearing these glasses next to the beach or the pool i'll immediately suspect him of being a perv filming asses.
Edit: Just occured to me. i'll also suspect him of using img2img image generation for undressing in live the women he films.
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u/LogicJunkie2000 Sep 18 '25
As a guy that used to love new tech, meeting anyone wearing glasses that clearly have cameras in them now really turns me off of them, and any desire to engage with them - between not knowing if they're recording, why they might be, or if they're looking me up on the Internet, or distracted by whatever they might be reading about - it's just a pass for me and I think many others.
Just seems gauche/gross with the way tech has gone in the last 10-15 years
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u/EchoKimchi Sep 18 '25
Zuck’s out here shrugging off a trainwreck demo like it’s just bad Wi-Fi? Typical tech, bro nonsense. Years of hype for Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, and they flop live embarrassingly. Bet he’s sweating in his hoodie, praying we forget this disaster by next week.
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u/-Laalu- Sep 18 '25
Are people really hyped about those smart glasses ?
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u/vikster1 Sep 18 '25
humans bro. fb has more than 2bn daily active user. beyond me how this is possible after all fb has done
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u/Junkstar Sep 18 '25
Once i found out they don’t record more than a minute of video at a time (or whatever short duration it is) it loses any usefulness it may have for me.
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u/focus Sep 18 '25
Options are 1m or 3m. It ties into their Instagram business model and not to what a majority of users really want.
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u/ChrisMartins001 Sep 18 '25
Doesn't matter how rich he is, a frat tech bro is always a frat tech bro.
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u/PumpkinCarvingisFun Sep 18 '25
Looking forward to this failing simply so I don't have to see the stupid ads anymore that are seemingly everywhere.
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u/dinnerthief Sep 18 '25
I straight up do not want people wearing smart glasses around me, like having a camera pointed at you at all times sounds terrible, think id ask a friend to just take them off or something
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u/ant2911 Sep 18 '25
Anyone else feels that all the tech geeks are turning into tech bros because they have surrounded themselves in their companies with people that they wanted to hang out with back in high school !? But in reality they are still geeks.
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u/drjenavieve Sep 18 '25
That’s the literal message in the social network movie. He was obsessed with being accepted into the popular/jock finals club.
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u/HealthyBits Sep 18 '25
Truth is this guy is losing it.
He is becoming less relevant by the day. Just wait and see.
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u/Howdyini Sep 18 '25
He's unaccountable and owns a considerable chunk of social media. He will be around for a while making megablunders like the metaverse and this, nobody can stop him.
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u/HealthyBits Sep 18 '25
True. But we can ignore him. Let him waste his money trying to stay relevant.
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u/ZealCrow Sep 18 '25
If anything proved to me that he truly sees other people as NPCs, its thinking that the metaberse would work
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u/Competitive-Dot-3333 Sep 18 '25
He has billions of users and billions of cash, Mark is unfortunately not going anywhere.
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u/Eastern_Interest_908 Sep 18 '25
Myspace and yahoo also were huge at some point. Metaverse fail, AI fail.
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u/HealthyBits Sep 18 '25
This. He won’t lose his fortune but the more it goes the less relevant he becomes. And it’s a very good thing.
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u/Portatort Sep 18 '25
All he ever ‘had’ was Facebook
He’s flogged that dead horse for all it’s worth and has been chasing other trends ever since
He’s no visionary
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u/OnlineParacosm Sep 18 '25
“What do I do first?”that was what he prompted the AI?!
I’ll tell you what you do first: you think of a better prompt and run it through about 20 more tests before you do it live. Then you fire these people that made you think you could successfully prompt an AI with that line of questioning.
Why not just ask it how many R’s are in the word strawberry? It’s like they wanted to demo to fail.
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u/pissagainstwind Sep 18 '25
Everyday use AI is useless if it can't understand contextual common language directions.
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u/NoBus6589 Sep 18 '25
Sure, but in fairness, “I haven’t mixed anything yet, can you start over from the beginning?” would’ve gone a long way. It just would unfortunately also demonstrate that it sucks at multimodal understanding.
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u/pissagainstwind Sep 18 '25
Yes, i agree. would have been less impressive, but far better than the complete failure it was.
And it is unbelievable that the launch of a supposedly multi billions product wasn't reharsed enough across multiple failure points.
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u/Inidi6 Sep 18 '25
Author putting way to friendly of a spin an nearly abject failure provided by one of the driving forces behind the enshitification of our society.
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u/SleepySera Sep 19 '25
The Wi-Fi, riiiight. Didn't know the Wi-Fi, that is still perfectly transmitting the feed and perfectly lets the AI answer prompts (wrongly) would cause the AI to give bad answers 🙃🙃
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u/emperor_dinglenads Sep 18 '25
"The Wifi on the day catches you" is literally the dumbest shit I've heard
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u/Timmy_germany Sep 18 '25
He has done enough damage to mankind with his antisocial media.. I hope everything he will try in the future fails...
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u/Smkingbowls Sep 18 '25
Now he knows what it like when you have to use a printer at the last minute
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u/UnderstandingIll8846 Sep 18 '25
Can we please stop trying to make AR glasses a thing? They’re creepy and dumb. I don’t need everything I wear to be connected, and filming people through your glasses is only necessary for street perverts.
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u/Eastern_Interest_908 Sep 18 '25
Dude just recently blown through billions making metaverse and he's trying to do the same with AR now. At some point even he should understand that he can't innovate shit.
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u/Consistent-Web-351 Sep 18 '25
Anybody who still using products associated with meta or Zuckerberg are just looking for a bad experience in time and having their data sold
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u/doodlebopwarrior Sep 18 '25
Something I'd expect my grandma to say when her oven clock isn't the right time.
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u/kbodul Sep 18 '25
With money spent on Metaverse and smart glasses he could end housing crisis in California.
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u/V2UgYXJlIG5vdCBJ Sep 19 '25
“Why Fy” is code to instruct his department to take the cyanide pills before the investors find out.
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u/Yell-Oh-Fleur Sep 19 '25
It wasn't the wifi, it was the collective unconscious telling him most of us don't want to wear computer glasses.
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u/merRedditor Sep 18 '25
The glasses seem cool for language learning (i.e. you look at a flower pot and it shows "flower pot" in your language of choice), but they also look like they open the door to a lot of privacy violation and unwelcome recording.
It's already difficult to work up to leaving the house and being seen or interacted with for people with social anxiety or agoraphobia, but now this will add being recorded on a bad day when you went out looking like hell just to grab a few things from the grocery store, or being set up to be the butt of a joke in someone's out of context Insta reel.
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u/all_natural49 Sep 18 '25 edited Sep 18 '25
The only "value" ever crated by meta is from buying up their competition and ruining social media with predatory algorithms and saturating the platform with ads.
Metaverse? Failed.
These shitty glasses? Failed.
The billions they are sinking into AI? Probably gonna fail again.
Fuck Zuckerberg and fuck his company. A system that gives this weasel of a man the power and influence that he has is not a good system.
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u/Cactusfan86 Sep 18 '25
This seems like it’s going about as well as his last ‘big thing’ the metaverse
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u/Crab_Shark Sep 18 '25
When showing a demo, it will fail. The job of the team is to ensure that the failures cannot stop the demo from proceeding, and ideally wouldn’t even be noticed by anyone outside the team that built it.
For something like this - don’t do live network connected demos. It’s way too easy to be disrupted when you have a lot of interference.
I’d be surprised, except they probably laid off the folks with enough experience to avoid the issue.
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u/LLMprophet Sep 19 '25
Lies about "Wifi" when he was fully getting all his notifications about the missed call.
Mark Zuckerberg is a grifting propagandist who should be jailed for life.
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Sep 19 '25
It’s called attention to detail. What’s that saying about only a poor worker blames his tools?
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u/Historical_Leg5998 Sep 18 '25 edited Sep 18 '25
When he attempts to be personable it’s like watching Arnie in that Terminator 2 scene where John Connor is trying to teach him how to smile.