Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Meta Connect 2025 to show off the corporation’s latest non-AI. The tool, designed to spy on the objects in your home and send that data back to Facebook for advertising reasons…wait, sorry, I mean to answer questions while responding to your current environment, was asked to help Mark’s 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. It’s 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. They’re giant sorting machines, which is why they’re 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, it’s a collective mass-delusion that these systems have any use in our day-to-day lives beyond plagiarism.
Here’s the set-up. Jack “Chef Cuso” Mancuso (the not-chef YouTuber and seller of knives and seasonings) is stood 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, “Maybe a steak sauce, maybe a Korean-inspired thing?”
“Yeah, let’s try it. It’s not something I’ve made before,” says Mancuso, remembering his script, “so I could definitely use the help.”
In the best case scenario for this Meta Connect demo, the Meta “AI” 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 “Sesame Oil” and “Soy Sauce,” with the words squarely facing the camera, sit next to—oh my goodness, would you look at that—a jar of Cuso-branded seasoning! There’s also some spring onions, a couple of lemons, two garlic cloves, salt and pepper and maybe a potato and a bottle of honey? It’s all next to a very sad-looking steak sandwich. So, Meta AI, what can we possibly do?
“Hey Meta, start Live AI,” says Mancuso, just like in rehearsal, before a very long and awkward pause. “Starting Live AI” the robot voice eventually intones, before adding the unimprovable words, “I love this set-up you have here, with soy sauce and other ingredients.” Thanks! It loves it! That’s so thoughtful and demonstrative that it was able to scan the words in the image. “How can I help?”
“Hey, could you help me make a Korean-inspired steak sauce for my steak sandwich here?” asks Mancuso, stood 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 doesn’t have a pear. Interesting.
“You can make a Korean-inspired steak sauce using soy sauce, sesame oil…” beings Meta AI, before Mancuso interrupts to stop the voice listing everything that happens to be there. “What do I do first?” he demands. Meta AI, clearly unimpressed by being cut off, falls silent. “What do I do first?” Mancuso asks again, fear entering his voice. And then the magic happens.
“You’ve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate a pear to add to the sauce.”
Mancuso looks like a rabbit looking into the lights of an oncoming juggernaut. He now only has panic. There’s nothing else for it, there’s only one option left. He repeats his line from the script for the third time.
“What do I do first?”
There’s then audience laughter.
“You’ve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate the pear and gently combine it with the base sauce.”
Mancuso seems to snap out of his stupor and makes the hilariously silly claim, “Alright, I think the wifi might be messed up. Sorry, back to you Mark.”
There’s louder audience laughter.
“It’s all good!” says Zuck, as he hears billions of dollars flushing down a toilet. “It’s a…the irony of the whole thing is you spend years making technology and then the wifi at the, er, day kinda…catches you.”
Yeah, the wifi. You know how a bad wifi connection causes an AI to skip steps in a recipe. We’ve all been there. Same reason I lost that game of pool—the 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, doesn’t know what Korean sauce is, nor what recipes are, because it doesn’t know anything. So it is that it can only make noises that sound like the way real humans have described things. Hence it having no way of knowing that ingredients haven’t already been mixed—just the ability to mimic recipe-like noises. The recipes it will have been trained on will say “after you’ve combined the ingredients…” so it does too. The words themselves do not mean anything to the LLM.
What’s so joyous about this particular incident isn’t just that it happened live on stage with one of the world’s richest men made to look a complete fool in front of the mocking laughter of the most non-hostile audience imaginable… Oh wait, it largely is that. That’s very joyous. But it’s 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 Zuckers pretending to make up, “Oh, I dunno, picking from every possible foodstuff in the entire universe, what about a…ooh! Korean-inspired steak sauce!” for a man stood 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 couldn’t. And if it had, it wouldn’t 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 Chef 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 here’s Jack Mancuso making a Korean-inspired steak sauce in 2023.
