Meta's live staged demo fails; the "AI" recording plays before the actor acts

https://old.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/1nkbig7/metas_live_staged_demo_fails_the_ai_recording/

159•personjerry•2h ago

Comments

pera•1h ago

There is a second part that is equally bad, but with Zuck:

https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nkbqyk/...

fluoridation•1h ago

God, that's actually painful to watch. I can't believe I lasted two minutes.

sebgan•1h ago

I was going to say that’s two minutes I won’t get back (and I won’t) but, ya know, schadenfreude.

fluoridation•1h ago

It's kind of like Peep Show, where the writers tried to engineer the most awkward social situations, only without the jokes.

chrisweekly•6m ago

Tangent: if you like cringey social awkwardness comedy (not my usual cup of tea, but in this case it's extraordinary, and hilarious), try "I Think You Should Leave".

"Brian's Hat" is the 1st one I saw and maybe the best: https://youtu.be/LO2k-BNySLI?si=qEX7STkSOeCVZtK-

Also "Hot Dog Car" https://youtu.be/WLfAf8oHrMo?si=jz5EKwjJZm1UMZau

twothreeone•55m ago

Mark's definitely mastered optimizing for peak cringe factor while at 1.95T valuation.

OJFord•1h ago

Would be good to change the OP link to this - it's the same clip but plus a bit more.

I_am_tiberius•57m ago

I really missed seeing Zuck sweat.

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•48m ago

Maybe it's modeled on Zuck's robotic voice

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•1h 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.

zer0zzz•1h ago

Yeah. I’m impressed we have any sort of wave guide display on sale commercially this year.

jaccola•1h 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!

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M4t14s7nSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxQOPFg2mo

rhetocj23•1h ago

Jobs was one of a kind. He had that aura that Bill G et al envied. He admitted so in a video that can be found on YT.

throw-the-towel•54m ago

Yet even Bill G handled public failure better than Zuck: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jGwy4sb9aO8

rhetocj23•46m ago

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.

asadm•10m ago

that clip reminds me of how Sundar reacts to these things.

Fricken•22m ago

Jobs emphasized user friendly products in aesthetically pleasing boxes. If Silicon Valley wasn't the densest and most obtuse place on earth he wouldn't stand out so hard.

stavros•11m ago

This is much better? He tossed the camera aggressively to the other person, and then made a snide comment, and that's better than blaming wifi?

johnnyanmac•51m 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.

ryandrake•1h ago

I love how they randomly blame the WiFi network, like anyone is going to buy it.

jerlam•1h ago

It's almost certainly a joke. Everyone knows that the demo failed.

rgovostes•17m ago

A reference to the 2010 iPhone 4 demo perhaps: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2297843/steve-jobs-wi-fi-m...

Reason077•1h 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•55m ago

Pretty sure it's a meme, like blaming the WLAN cable.

gruez•31m ago

*wifi cable

twothreeone•43m 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".

kridsdale3•22m ago

It's colloquial in the younger generations to use the term Wifi to actually refer to a WAN connection to one's home or building, regardless of Physical Layer Transport.

skhameneh•1h 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•1h 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•1h ago

So the live demo failed?

reader9274•1h ago

Should've downloaded more ram for the wifi to work better

sampton•1h ago

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•54m ago

The new Apple presentations are much more information dense, and tailored to the main (online) audience. They’re clearly better.

sampton•48m 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•42m 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•35m ago

Even with that, Live demos are incredibly more better than hour long demos.

kridsdale3•23m ago

They also force the developers to make it work, under threat of being fired, and in the ire of Steve Jobs case, being yeeted in to the sun along with their ancestors and descendents.

ajcp•4m ago

During that first iPhone demo they also had a portable cell tower (cell on wheels) just off-stage to mimic a better signal strength than it was capable of. NYTimes write-up on the whole thing is worth the read [0].

0.https://web.archive.org/web/20250310045704/https://www.nytim...

jeffgreco•31m ago

They are boring infomercials now. The live audience used to keep it from feeling too prepackaged.

asadm•12m ago

and so boring. I would take Jobs presenting a live demo than any of this heavily-produced stuff.

self_awareness•1h ago

Those WiFi's man, they're always trouble

watersb•1h ago

Never work with children, animals, and puppets.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverWorkWithChi...

alangibson•1h 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.

johnnyanmac•1h 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.

privatelypublic•1h ago

Well, it _IS_ a rock after all.

smelendez•37m 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?

poidos•22m ago

It's because their main business (ads, tracking) makes infinite money so it doesn't matter what all the other parts of the business do, are, or if they work or not.

garciasn•15m ago

Sure it does; as long as those products add infinity on top of infinity. That demofail was the overflow caused by adding two infinite values.

dgfitz•20m ago

> confused the AI.

I will die on this hill. It isn’t AI. You can’t confuse it.

MattDaEskimo•1h 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

nba456_•1h ago

still better than the pre-taped apple events. happy to see these products in action

AdmiralAsshat•1h 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.

> https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cn248pLDoZY/?utm_source=ig_em...

0: https://kotaku.com/meta-ai-mark-zuckerberg-korean-steak-sauc...

patrickhogan1•46m 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).

axblount•39m ago

Live demos are especially hard when you're selling snake oil.

smelendez•34m 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?

hadlock•31m ago

Adrenaline makes people do interesting things

triceratops•14m ago

> I’m mostly confused why the guy interrupted what sounded like a valid response

I thought they were demonstrating interruption handling.

andoando•10m ago

I think he was just trying to get it back on track instead of letting it go on about something that was completely off

tkamado•33m ago

Live demos being hard isn't an excuse for cheating.

SpicyLemonZest•23m ago

Despite the Reddit post's title, I don't think there's any reason to believe the AI was a recording or otherwise cheated. (Why would they record two slightly different voice lines for adding the pear?) It just really thought he'd combined the base ingredients.

autoexec•7m ago

That's even worse because it would mean that it wasn't the scripted recording that failed, it means the AI itself sucks and can't tell that the bowl is empty and nothing was combined. Either this was the failure of a recorded demo that was faked to hide how bad the AI is, or it accurately demonstrated that the AI itself is a failure. Either way it's not a good look.

asadm•13m ago

this isn't cheating. the models are unpredictable. This product is going out the door this month, there is no reason to cheat.

yallpendantools•33m ago

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.

monooso•14m ago

If your friend isn't already aware of Tommy Cooper [1], he's in for a treat.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Cooper

Poomba•8m ago

He was so funny, people laughed when he died!

fluoridation•5m ago

So, wait, is he just a shitty magician and a funny guy, or does he fail on purpose?

hu3•27m ago

I hope they keep doing live demos. This is much better than prerecorded videos.

pciexpgpu•26m ago

It's an ad network with an attached optional pair of glasses.

It's the platform Zuck always wanted to own but never had the vision beyond 'it's an ad platform with some consumer stuff in it'.

I am super impressed with the hardware (especially the neural band) but it just so happens that a very pricey car is being directly sold by an oil company as a trojan horse.

We all know what the car is for unfortunately.

I can't wait to see what Apple has in store now in terms of the hardware.

autoexec•5m ago

Someone would have to be dumb to give facebook access to collect data from everything they see and hear in their life combined with the ability to plaster ads over every available surface in their field of view. They'd have to be beyond stupid to pay for it.

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