Meta ran into some spectacularly embarrassing technical issues during the live demos of its new smart glasses this week, and now we know why. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, explained in an Instagram AMA why two notable demos — an influencer asking the AI assistant for cooking instructions, and Mark Zuckerberg attempting to pick up a WhatsApp call — failed.
“When the chef said ‘hey Meta, start Live AI,’ it started every single Meta Ray-Ban’s Live AI in the building,” said Bosworth. “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. We DDoS’d ourselves, basically.” So yeah, it wasn’t the Wi-Fi, as Zuck claimed on stage.
The video call issue was “more obscure,” according to Bosworth, and involved a “never-before-seen bug” that occurred because the Display glasses had gone to sleep at the same moment that the device received the call notification. Bosworth says that the bug has now been fixed, but acknowledged the onstage demo was a “terrible place for that bug to show up.”
Even with the technical blunders, Meta providing an honest live product demonstration is a nice break from the usual fare of pre-recorded videos and generative AI errors that companies like Apple and Google showcase these days.
