Meta Connect 2025 was packed 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 issue involved a chef trying and failing to get the glasses to help him prepare a meal to showcase Live AI – an always-on version of Meta’s AI that can give you continual contextual assistance by following your actions.
After a few attempts to go to the next step of the process, the chef had to give up and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to carry on with the show, and put the blame on the Wi-Fi. Andrew Bosworth explained later that the Wi-Fi wasn’t at fault, “When the chef said ‘Hey Meta start Live AI’ it started every single Ray-Ban Meta’s Live AI in the building, and there was a lot of people in that building.”
He added that what made matters worse was “we had routed Live AI traffic to our dev server, in theory to isolate it, but we had done it for everyone in that building on those access points.” Basically “We DDoS’d ourselves.”
A DDoS is a cyberattack that aims to overload a server by throwing as much traffic at it as possible from multiple sources so that it can’t be accessed.
Bosworth said that they had rehearsed the demo and it went smoothly, but that there were nowhere near as many Ray-Ban devices in the building to cause issues.
A ‘never-before-seen bug’
What about the video call glitch that ruined Bosworth’s intro to the show? This was “quite a bit more obscure” according to his post-show analysis.
In what he described as “A never-before-seen bug in a new product”, Bosworth said the cause of the issue was “The display had gone to sleep at the very instant the notification had come in that a call was coming.”
“And so it was a race condition which caused it that even when Mark woke the display back up we didn’t show the answer notification to him.”
A race condition is a programming term for when multiple processes are being executed at the same time that rely on shared data. The processes typically aren’t meant to be running at the same time, and have accidentally entered into a race to see which completes first – potentially altering the shared data and messing up whatever the other process was trying to do.
In the demo, it sounds like the notifications and wake up feature were both trying to do different things with the display causing the onstage gaffe.
Regardless of what went wrong, the demo was “the first time we had ever seen” the bug according to Bosworth, adding (while smiling) “it’s fixed now.”
Post-fail postivity
In other Instagram Stories, Andrew Bosworth said that while the demo failures were a bummer, they haven’t convinced Meta to abandon live demos or caused much embarrassment.
That’s because lots of 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 refers to them, wouldn’t be so positive if there wasn’t positive stuff to say about the glasses.
Speaking of which, Lance said of the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses “based on my experience, nothing comes closer to effortlessly delivering information at a glance, and I’m starting to wonder if this is a glimpse of what will someday replace smartphones.
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hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
