Zuck Promised Us Superintelligence… Instead His Live Demo Gave Us Flashbacks to the Metaverse

Superintelligence, according to Zuckerberg, means sunglasses that fold under pressure like a cheap lawn chair.

Mark Zuckerberg stormed onstage at Meta Connect on Wednesday with the misplaced swagger of a suburban dad convinced his new TikTok haircut and Amazon “icy chain” combo pack suddenly make him Chris Brown. Of course, part of his new swag had to do with the new Ray-Ban Display smart glasses he was wearing… $799 shades that are supposedly built to beam “superintelligence” straight into your eyeballs. 

Instead, the demo went about as smooth as Taco Bell the morning after. As soon as he started trying to show off… calls wouldn’t connect, recipes wouldn’t load… basically everything went to sh*t. So Zuck had to fall back on the classic tech bro excuse (“bad WiFi”) like a college kid begging for an extension on their 12-page term paper they started the night before.

Of course, Zuck has a history of turning his wet dreams into billion-dollar hobbies. The metaverse was supposed to be his moon landing, but it turned out more like a middle school dance where everyone stayed home. Companies funneled billions into VR boardrooms and scooped up Monopoly money plots of “prime” digital land… only to discover no one gives a damn about clocking in as a floating torso next to Steve from HR. That’s old news now. The new obsession is glasses that can read your texts, answer your dumb questions, and maybe (if you sacrifice enough to the gods of bandwidth) actually let you pick up a phone call.

(Source: Fox Business)

The star of the show, the Meta Ray-Ban Display, is pretty much a normal-looking pair of Ray-Bans with a tiny screen baked into one lens. They’re controlled by a wristband that Zuckerberg dramatically called “the world’s first mainstream neural interface.” Translation: a glorified Wii controller strapped to your arm so you can feel futuristic while paying nearly double the price of previous Ray-Bans. At $799, these shades cost more than a decent laptop… which is wild considering they just flunked their job interview live onstage (I know, I know, it was a bad connection).

Meta didn’t stop there. Zuck also trotted out upgraded Ray-Bans with slightly better cameras and a collab with Oakley for “sports glasses.” Because if we’re gonna keep it 100, nothing screams athletic dominance like Mark Zuckerberg in wraparounds, dripping sweat on a treadmill while asking his AI assistant to buy a archery bow so he can brag about it on his next Joe Rogan podcast appearance. If this is what “superintelligence” looks like, we might be better off sticking with Siri telling us “here’s what I found on the web.”

And then there’s the little matter of who’s actually building these things. The glasses are being manufactured by Chinese giant Goertek, which has quietly gobbled up chunks of the smart glasses industry. Meanwhile, Zuck’s been onstage lately posturing as a Washington hawk, railing against Beijing like he’s auditioning for a cabinet position for Donnie Politics. Turns out, when you’re chasing “superintelligence,” hypocrisy still scales.

Anyways, behind the embarrassing demos, Meta is still blowing through billions trying to catch up in AI. They’ve restructured their AI team more times in the last six months than most people change their bedsheets, poached researchers from rivals like OpenAI and Google with $100 million sign-on bonuses, and rebranded their AI division as the “Meta Superintelligence Lab”... because when in doubt, paint the word “super” on the door and pray investors ignore fundamentals.

The problem is, Wall Street’s seen this movie before. First it was the metaverse, now it’s “AI glasses,” and Zuck is still hoping investors will ignore the fact that every “live demo” ends up looking like a blooper reel from The Office. Not a single investor seemed to buy the “connection” excuse. Shares pretty much played possum because, shocker, people aren’t convinced that Ray-Bans with Alexa hiding in the lens are the future of humanity (at least not yet).

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta as mentioned in the article.