I have a friend who does magic shows. He sells his shows as magic and stand-up comedy. It's both live entertainment, okay, but he is the only person I've ever seen use that tagline. We went to see him perform once and everything became clear when he opened the night.
"This is supposed to be a magic show," he told us. "But if my tricks fail you can laugh at it and we'll just do stand-up comedy."
Zuck, for a modest and totally-reasonable fee, I will introduce you to my friend. You can add his tricks (wink wink) to your newly-assembled repertoire of human charisma.
patrickhogan1 · 14m ago
Credit where it’s due: doing live demos is hard. Yesterday didn’t feel staged—it looked like the classic “last-minute tweak, unexpected break.” Most builders have been there. I certainly have (I once spent 6 hours at a hackathon and broke the Flask server keying in a last minute change on the steps of the stage before going on).
smelendez · 2m ago
Yeah, I just watched it again and I’m mostly confused why the guy interrupted what sounded like a valid response.
I wonder if his audio was delayed? Or maybe the response wasn’t what they rehearsed and he was trying to get it on track?
tkamado · 1m ago
Live demos being hard isn't an excuse for cheating.
axblount · 7m ago
Live demos are especially hard when you're selling snake oil.
pera · 1h ago
There is a second part that is equally bad, but with Zuck:
God, that's actually painful to watch. I can't believe I lasted two minutes.
twothreeone · 23m ago
Mark's definitely mastered optimizing for peak cringe factor while at 1.95T valuation.
sebgan · 58m ago
I was going to say that’s two minutes I won’t get back (and I won’t) but, ya know, schadenfreude.
fluoridation · 53m ago
It's kind of like Peep Show, where the writers tried to engineer the most awkward social situations, only without the jokes.
OJFord · 58m ago
Would be good to change the OP link to this - it's the same clip but plus a bit more.
I_am_tiberius · 25m ago
I really missed seeing Zuck sweat.
skhameneh · 53m ago
As much as it'll be "interesting" to see how models behave in real world examples (presumably similarly to how the demos went), I'm not convinced this is a premade recording like what seems to be implied.
I'm imagining this is an incomplete flow within a software prototype that may have jumped steps and lacks sufficient multi-modal capability to correct.
It could also be staged recordings.
But, I don't think it really matters. Models are easily capable of working with the setup and flow they have for the demo. It's real world accuracy, latency, convenience, and other factors that will impact actual users the most.
What's the reliability and latency needed for these to be a useful tool?
For example, I can't imagine many people wanting to use the gesture writing tools for most messages. It's cool, I like that it was developed, but I doubt it'll see substantial adoption with what's currently being pitched.
dabbz · 47m ago
Yea the behavior of the AI read to me more like a hard coded demo but still very much "live". I suspect him cutting it off was poorly timed and that timing could have amplified due to WiFi? Who knows. I wasn't there. I didn't build it.
YeahThisIsMe · 32m ago
So the live demo failed?
AdmiralAsshat · 30m ago
The Kotaku article on this had a really nice final zinger[0]:
> Oh, and here’s Jack Mancuso making a Korean-inspired steak sauce in 2023.
I bet they rehearsed a dozen times and never failed as bad live. Got to give them props for keeping the live demos. Apple has neutered its demos so much it's now basically 2 hr long commercials.
donkyrf · 22m ago
The new Apple presentations are much more information dense, and tailored to the main (online) audience. They’re clearly better.
sampton · 16m ago
More dense but less trust worthy. I don't think they would have pushed apple intelligence the way they did if there was a live demo.
crooked-v · 10m ago
Live Apple demos were always held together with duct tape in the first place. That first "live" iPhone demo had a memorized sequence that Jobs needed to use to keep the whole phone OS from hard crashing.
suriya-ganesh · 3m ago
Even with that, Live demos are incredibly more better than hour long demos.
alangibson · 38m ago
That wasn't prerecorded, but it was rigged. They probably practiced a few times and it confused the AI. Still it's no excuse. They've dropped Apollo-program level money on this and it's still dumb as a rock.
I'm endless amazed that Meta has a ~2T market cap, yet they can't build products.
smelendez · 5m ago
That was my thought — the memory might not have been properly cleared from the last rehearsal.
I found the use case honestly confusing though. This guy has a great kitchen, just made steak, and has all the relevant ingredients in house and laid out but no idea how to turn them into a sauce for his sandwich?
privatelypublic · 33m ago
Well, it _IS_ a rock after all.
johnnyanmac · 34m ago
At this point, honesty is an oasis that is the 2025 year of scams and grifts. I'm just waiting for all the bubbles to pop.
I love how they randomly blame the WiFi network, like anyone is going to buy it.
twothreeone · 11m ago
Somebody said the cooking guy was some influencer person? I noticed that many non-tech people often resort to this excuse, even in situations where it makes absolutely no sense (e.g., on a desktop with only ethernet, or with mic/speakers connected via cable). It's almost like they just substitute "bad wifi" for "glitch".
jerlam · 43m ago
It's almost certainly a joke. Everyone knows that the demo failed.
Reason077 · 30m ago
Bad idea to rely on WiFi for an important demo in a crowded environment. It would have worked fine in testing but when the crowd arrives and they all start streaming etc, they bring hundreds more devices all competing for bandwidth.
Zuck should have known better and used Ethernet for this one!
tannhaeuser · 23m ago
Pretty sure it's a meme, like blaming the WLAN cable.
reader9274 · 52m ago
Should've downloaded more ram for the wifi to work better
MattDaEskimo · 33m ago
More than likely the full response was kept as context despite being interrupted.
Notably though, the AI was clearly not utilizing its visual feed to work alongside him as implied
jjbinx007 · 1h ago
This is like a Black Mirror episode. Also, is it a conscious decision to make the TTS sound so robotic?
blinding-streak · 16m ago
Maybe it's modeled on Zuck's robotic voice
nba456_ · 32m ago
still better than the pre-taped apple events. happy to see these products in action
self_awareness · 40m ago
Those WiFi's man, they're always trouble
Fricken · 1h ago
What a piece of crap. The glasses don't seem to work very well either.
josefritzishere · 1h ago
AI is hot trash. When will this river of garbage stop?
zer0zzz · 1h ago
These hot takes with no context only make the ai argument stronger.
mattigames · 55m ago
That sounds a bit too much like "this is good for Bitcoin"
timpera · 1h ago
The failures on stage were kind of endearing, to be honest, especially the one with Zuck. Plus the products seem really cool, I hope I'll be able to try them out soon.
jaccola · 53m ago
Zuckerberg has negative charisma, it's painful to watch...
Jobs handled this so much better; while clearly he is pissed, he doesn't leave you cringing in mutual embarrassment, goes to show it isn't as easy as he makes it look!
I mean Bill wasnt figuring out how to get back at girls that rejected him in college lol.
Zuck carries that energy no matter what he does nor what amount of wealth he amasses.
johnnyanmac · 19m ago
Endearing is great for trying to sell a heartfelt, homeade piece of art. It clashes when it's a trillionaire company trying to pretend this product can replace entire sectors of human labor.
zer0zzz · 1h ago
Yeah. I’m impressed we have any sort of wave guide display on sale commercially this year.
"This is supposed to be a magic show," he told us. "But if my tricks fail you can laugh at it and we'll just do stand-up comedy."
Zuck, for a modest and totally-reasonable fee, I will introduce you to my friend. You can add his tricks (wink wink) to your newly-assembled repertoire of human charisma.
I wonder if his audio was delayed? Or maybe the response wasn’t what they rehearsed and he was trying to get it on track?
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nkbqyk/...
I'm imagining this is an incomplete flow within a software prototype that may have jumped steps and lacks sufficient multi-modal capability to correct.
It could also be staged recordings. But, I don't think it really matters. Models are easily capable of working with the setup and flow they have for the demo. It's real world accuracy, latency, convenience, and other factors that will impact actual users the most.
What's the reliability and latency needed for these to be a useful tool?
For example, I can't imagine many people wanting to use the gesture writing tools for most messages. It's cool, I like that it was developed, but I doubt it'll see substantial adoption with what's currently being pitched.
> Oh, and here’s Jack Mancuso making a Korean-inspired steak sauce in 2023.
> https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cn248pLDoZY/?utm_source=ig_em...
0: https://kotaku.com/meta-ai-mark-zuckerberg-korean-steak-sauc...
I'm endless amazed that Meta has a ~2T market cap, yet they can't build products.
I found the use case honestly confusing though. This guy has a great kitchen, just made steak, and has all the relevant ingredients in house and laid out but no idea how to turn them into a sauce for his sandwich?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverWorkWithChi...
Zuck should have known better and used Ethernet for this one!
Notably though, the AI was clearly not utilizing its visual feed to work alongside him as implied
Jobs handled this so much better; while clearly he is pissed, he doesn't leave you cringing in mutual embarrassment, goes to show it isn't as easy as he makes it look!
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M4t14s7nSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxQOPFg2mo
Zuck carries that energy no matter what he does nor what amount of wealth he amasses.