Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presents the new Ray-Ban display glasses at the 2025 Meta Connect conference (Benjamin Legendre/Getty Images)

Watch: Meta virtual reality conference bloopers

Meta Connect was tough to watch.

Rani Molla

9/18/25 8:34AM

Meta unveiled a host of seemingly innovative products and features at its annual virtual reality conference, Meta Connect, but what stood out were all the mess-ups.

Tech product events usually aren’t perfect, but they’re highly rehearsed and controlled environments, so they’re rarely this bad — especially for a company as big and as practiced as Meta.

While the prerecorded videos of the products in use were slick and highly produced, some of the live demos simply failed.

“Glasses are the ideal form factor for personal superintelligence because they let you stay present in the moment while getting access to all of these AI capabilities to make you smarter, help you communicate better, improve your memory, improve your senses,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated at the start of the event, but the ensuing bloopers certainly didn’t make it feel that way.

In the very first demo of Live AI, Chef Jack Mancuso tried to get a recipe for steak sauce only to have the AI ignore his repeated requests and skip steps:

Perhaps the most painful example of the night was when Zuckerberg attempted to take a video call from CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who’s recently been spending time in his new role as an Army officer. They tried five times and eventually Boz had to come onstage.

“We’re going to have Boz come out here and we’re just going to go to the next thing that I wanted to show and hope that will work,” Zuckerberg said, visibly stressed.

Throughout the event, Zuckerberg fumbled words and blamed the Wi-Fi for the glitches. It was uncomfortable, strange, and distracted from the product lineup, which included new Ray-Bans with a built-in display that’s controlled by a wristband and Hyperscape Capture, tech that allows Quest users to quickly scan a room to create a virtual version of it.

“This isn’t a prototype,” Zuckerberg said of the Ray-Ban Display glasses with the wristband earlier in the event. “This is here. This is ready to go and you’re going to be able to buy them in a couple of weeks.”

But if the tech doesn’t work for Zuckerberg, who’s so practiced with the wristband he can type 30 words per minute, what are the rest of us who aren’t the CEO of the company to expect in real-life, day-to-day use cases?

Fortunately for Meta, analysts seem to have looked past the bloopers, with Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Cantor Fitzgerald reiterating “buy” ratings after the event. Meta stock is up 0.5% premarket.

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

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Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

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