loading . . . Mark Zuckerberg Demos New Facebook AI And It Couldnât Have Gone Worse Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Meta Connect 2025 to show off the corporationâs latest non-AI. The tool, designed to spy on the objects in your home and send that data back to Facebook for advertising reasonsâŠwait, sorry, I mean to answer questions while responding to your current environment, was asked to help Markâs pretend-friend Jack Mancuso create a new sauce for his sandwich. Even in the heavily rehearsed and pre-scripted demonstration, the AI immediately shit the bed, leaving Mancuso and Zuckerberg to spuriously blame the wifi for the obvious technological fail.
The AI being hyped right now is not AI at all. Itâs really important that we all acknowledge this, that the world is selling itself a multi-billion-dollar lemon: predictive text engines that have nothing intelligent about them. Theyâre giant sorting machines, which is why theyâre so good at identifying patterns in scientific research, and could genuinely advance medicine in wonderful ways. But what they cannot do is _think_ , and as such, itâs a collective mass-delusion that these systems have any use in our day-to-day lives beyond plagiarism.
Hereâs the set-up. Jack âChef Cusoâ Mancuso (the not-chef YouTuber and seller of knives and seasonings) is standing on camera in a kitchen set, before a table of ingredients capable of being put together for pretty much one purpose. Zuckerberg fake-ass pretends to think up an idea on the spot for what could be cooked up, âMaybe a steak sauce, maybe a Korean-inspired thing?â
âYeah, letâs try it. Itâs not something Iâve made before,â says Mancuso, remembering his script, âso I could definitely use the help.â
In the best case scenario for this Meta Connect demo, the Meta âAIâ would scan the table of ingredients in front of Mancuso, and suggest a sauce he could make from the items it recognizes. The hilariously clearly-labeled bottles of âSesame Oilâ and âSoy Sauce,â with the words squarely facing the camera, sit next toâoh my goodness, would you look at thatâa jar of Cuso-branded seasoning! Thereâs also some spring onions, a couple of lemons, two garlic cloves, salt and pepper and maybe a potato and a bottle of honey? Itâs all next to a very sad-looking steak sandwich. So, Meta AI, what can we _possibly_ do?
âHey Meta, start Live AI,â says Mancuso, just like in rehearsal, before a very long and awkward pause. âStarting Live AIâ the robot voice eventually intones, before adding the unimprovable words, âI love this set-up you have here, with soy sauce and other ingredients.â Thanks! It loves it! Thatâs so thoughtful and demonstrative that it was able to scan the words in the image. âHow can I help?â
âHey, could you help me make a Korean-inspired steak sauce for my steak sandwich here?â asks Mancuso, standing in front of the exact ingredients used to make Korean steak sauce according to this online recipe. Oh, except for a pear. That recipe I just found wants a pear. He doesnât have a pear. Interesting.
âYou can make a Korean-inspired steak sauce using soy sauce, sesame oilâŠâ beings Meta AI, before Mancuso interrupts to stop the voice listing everything that happens to be there. âWhat do I do first?â he demands. Meta AI, clearly unimpressed by being cut off, falls silent. âWhat do I do first?â Mancuso asks again, fear entering his voice. And then the magic happens.
> LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #LiveAI
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> â Shacknews (@shacknews.com) 2025-09-18T00:34:42.409Z
âYouâve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate a pear to add to the sauce.â
Mancuso looks like a rabbit looking into the lights of an oncoming juggernaut. He now only has panic. Thereâs nothing else for it, thereâs only one option left. He repeats his line from the script for the third time.
âWhat do I do first?â
Thereâs then audience laughter.
âYouâve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate the pear and gently combine it with the base sauce.â
Mancuso seems to snap out of his stupor and makes the hilariously silly claim, âAlright, I think the wifi might be messed up. Sorry, back to you Mark.â
Thereâs louder audience laughter.
âItâs all good!â says Zuck, as he hears billions of dollars flushing down a toilet. âItâs aâŠthe irony of the whole thing is you spend years making technology and then the wifi at the, er, day kindaâŠcatches you.â
Yeah, the wifi. You know how a bad wifi connection causes an AI to skip steps in a recipe. Weâve all been there. Same reason I lost that game of poolâthe damn wifi in the bar.
Rather than because of wifi, the reason this happened is because these so-called AIs are just regurgitating information that has been parsed from scanning the internet. It will have been trained on recipes written by professional chefs, home cooks and cookery sites, then combined this information to create something that sounds a lot like a recipe for a Korean sauce. But it, not being an intelligence, doesnât know what Korean sauce is, nor what recipes are, because it doesnât _know_ anything. So it can only make noises that sound like the way real humans have described things. Hence it having no way of knowing that ingredients havenât already been mixedâjust the ability to mimic recipe-like noises. The recipes it will have been trained on will say âafter youâve combined the ingredientsâŠâ so it does too.
Whatâs so joyous about this particular incident isnât just that it happened live on stage with one of the worldâs richest men made to look a complete fool in front of the mocking laughter of the most non-hostile audience imaginableâŠOh wait, it largely is that. Thatâs very joyous. But itâs also that it was so ludicrously over-prepared, faked to such a degree to try to eliminate all possibilities for error, and even so it _still_ went so spectacularly badly.
From Zuckerberg pretending to make up, âOh, I dunno, picking from every possible foodstuff in the entire universe, what about aâŠooh! Korean-inspired steak sauce!â for a man standing in front of the base ingredients of a Korean-inspired steak sauce, to the hilarious fake labels with their bold Arial font facing the camera, it was all clearly intended to force things to go as smoothly as possible. We were all supposed to be wowed that this AI could recognize the ingredients (it imagined a pear) and combine them into the exact sauce they wanted! But it couldnât. And if it had, it wouldnât have known the correct proportions, because it would have scanned dozens and dozens of recipes designed to make different volumes of sauce, with contradictory ingredients (the lack of both gochujang _and_ rice wine vinegar, presumably to try to make it even simpler, seems likely to not have helped), and just approximated based on averages. Plagiarism on this scale leads to a soupy slop.
You know what Cuso could have done? He could have Googled a recipe, and visited a trusted site. Or, and sorry to be quite so old-fashioned, looked in a recipe book! Hell, he could have looked up instructions on Facebook.
Oh, and hereâs Jack Mancuso making a Korean-inspired steak sauce in 2023.
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