Tech-focused business publication The Information drummed up plenty of excitement around a major guest gracing the first episode of its new YouTube show (which has the eyebrow-raising name TITV.)
During today's kickoff installment, the show locked down none other than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who sat down with The Information founder and journalist Jessica Lessin for a live interview.
But it didn't take long for the Amazon-sponsored chat to grind to a halt. The tech mogul and Lessin's audio were painfully absent from the stream on YouTube; their mouths were moving, so they could clearly hear each other, but the audience heard nothing but silence.
Soon, host Akash Pasricha was forced to intervene.
"Folks, I'm really sorry to jump in here," he said, sounding frustrated. "I think we don't have sound from our interview with Mark Zuckerberg and Jessica Lessin."
"I don't think we'll be able to figure it out in just a minute," Pasricha said. "We're gonna call the show there just for today," he added, apologizing for blowing off Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez and their upcoming conversation.
The unfortunate incident is a timely reminder that even in the age of powerful AI agents, quantum computers, and genetic hacking, simple technological challenges like delivering a talking heads-style interview on a live stream can still force powerful institutions to their knees.
(If this embedded version doesn't snap to the right timestamp, just scrub forward to around the 39:40 mark for a quick taste of the silent film era.
Zuckerberg has been on a media blitz lately, promoting Meta's powerful data centers to power its generative AI efforts.
"We’re calling the first one Prometheus and it’s coming online in ‘26," he wrote in a post on Threads Monday morning.
The Facebook chief's firm had already been in the news for poaching talent from Sam Altman's OpenAI, as well as ex-Apple AI executive Ruoming Pang — who was reportedly offered more than $200 million for the gig — highlighting fierce competition among the frontrunners of the AI race.
The new hires are meant to support Meta's so-called Superintelligence Labs, which were set up to consolidate the media empire's AI efforts.
Meta has been on the back foot in its increasingly desperate attempts to keep up with the likes of Google and OpenAI. The company was heavily criticized for making misleading claims about its Llama 4 AI model earlier this year, complicating matters.
While we have yet to physically hear Zuckerberg's chat with Lessin for ourselves, the conversation was centered around "his AI hiring blitz and what's next," according to The Information founder.
Lessin has yet to publicly address today's unfortunate technical hiccup, but chances are, the publication will try its best to get the recording — if they managed to capture it — out to the public sooner rather than later.
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