At Meta Connect on September 17, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote centered on the $799 Ray-Ban Display smart glasses: AI-powered, with a built-in display and a neural wristband, pitched as “agentic AI” that could act on a wearer’s behalf. Two live demos were built into the keynote to show it working: a cooking assistant that would walk a chef through a recipe step by step, and a video call placed through the glasses to Meta’s CTO.
Both failed on stage. The cooking demo malfunctioned when the glasses’ live-AI feature activated on every pair in the building at once, not just the presenter’s; the video call didn’t connect after four attempts, at which point Zuckerberg gave up and moved on. Reporting since has treated the failures less as an embarrassment than as an accidental case study: a keynote built to demonstrate frictionless AI that instead demonstrated, live and repeatedly, exactly the friction the product claims to remove.
