Meta Connect 2025 was filled with impressive smart glasses reveals, but also several iconic live demo fails. CTO Andrew Bosworth has since taken to Instagram to reveal what went wrong.
The first demo problem involved a chef who tried and failed to get the glasses to help him prepare a meal to show the live AI ALY-On version of Metas AI that can give you continuous contextual help by following your actions.
After a few attempts to go to the next step in the process, the chef had to give up and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to continue with the show and blame Wi-Fi. Andrew Bosworth later explained that Wi-Fi wasn’t guilty, “When the chef said ‘Hey Meta Start Live Ai’ it started every single Ray-Ban Meta’s Live AI in the building and there were many people in this building.”
He added that what worsened things was “We had directed live AI traffic to our DEV server in theory to isolate it, but we had done it for everyone in that building at these access points.” Basic “We ddose ourselves.”
A DDOS is a cyberattack aimed at overloading a server by throwing as much traffic on it as possible from multiple sources so that it cannot be accessed.
Bosworth said they had practiced the demo and it went smoothly, but that there were nowhere near so many beam-ray units in the building to cause problems.
A ‘never before seen bug’
What about the video calling mirror that destroyed Bosworth’s introduction to the show? This was “quite a little more unclear” according to his analysis after the show.
In what he described as “a never -seen bug in a new product,” Bosworth said that the reason for the problem was “The display had gone asleep at the moment the message had come from a call.”
“And then it was a race state that caused it that even when Mark woke up on the screen, we did not show the response message to him.”
A race state is a programming period for when multiple processes are performed at the same time that depend on shared data. The processes are typically not intended to run at the same time and have accidentally entered into a race to see what has been completed first – potentially changing the shared data and messy, no matter what the other process tried to do.
In the demo, it sounds like the messages and wake up the feature both tried to do different things with the display causing gaffe on stage.
Whatever went wrong, the demo was “The first time we had ever seen” The mistake according to Bosworth, and added (while he smiled) “It’s resolved now.”
Postivity after FAIL
In other Instagram stories, Andrew Bosworth said that even though the demo errors were a bummer, they have not convinced Meta to give up live demos or caused much embarrassment.
That’s because many journalists – like our own Lance Ulanoff and Josephine Watson – have tried the glasses out and been very impressed with what they’ve seen.
These “critics”, as Bosworth refer to them, would not be so positive if there were no positive things to say about the glasses.
When we talk about it, Lance said about Meta Ray-Ban display glasses “Based on my experience, nothing is getting any closer to delivering information with a moment and I start to wonder if this is a glimpse of what one day will replace smartphones.
