Author: openjargon

• Joe Biden and Donald Trump will debate Thursday night.
• Their face-off is the earliest major debate on record.
• There are other notable changes, including commercial breaks and no studio audience. 

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are set to face off Thursday night in the earliest major presidential debate on record.

Both men enter their first faceoff of 2024 locked into a race that remains too close to call nationally. According to Real Clear Politics' polling averages, Trump holds narrow leads in key swing states that could decide the race.

In an era where Americans watch few live events besides football, the evening offers both campaigns a chance to get their message in front of millions.

Here are the vital facts you need to know before Thursday night's debate.

When is it and how can I watch it?

The first presidential debate of the 2024 election will be Thursday, June 27 at 9 p.m. ET. CNN will host the debate, but all major broadcast and cable networks will offer simulcasts. You can also stream the debate through Max. If you can't access the debate any of those ways, CNN is also streaming it through its website here. You don't even need a cable login.

The debate will last 90 minutes.

How is this debate different?

Beyond taking place in the summer, this debate will differ from any other recent memory. Instead of a live audience, Trump and Biden will square off at CNN's studios in Atlanta. There will be moderators, but both campaigns effectively killed off the bipartisan organization that has hosted debates for years. So, CNN chose anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

At Biden team's urging, CNN has also pledged to mute the mic of the candidate who is not speaking. You might recall that in 2020, Biden asked then-President Trump, "Will you shut up man?" during their raucous first debate. The first debate was considered by just about everyone involved to be an abject disaster.

Trump is set to get the last word this time since Biden elected to choose his podium position after winning a coin toss. As a result, Trump will be the last to deliver a closing statement. There will be no opening statements.

Wait, there are going to be commercials?

Yes, there will also be two commercial breaks. This, too, is a major departure from traditional debates.

What about fact-checking?

CNN correspondent Daniel Dale rose to fame fact-checking Trump, but don't expect him, Tapper, or Bash to chime during the debate. David Chalian, CNN's political director, told The New York Times that the debate "is not the ideal arena for live fact-checking." The fact-checking will have to wait until after the debate finishes.

What's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. going to be doing?

It's not entirely clear yet. We know he won't be joining the two presidents on the stage. CNN confirmed that Kennedy failed to reach their twin thresholds of 15% in four selected national polls and qualifying for the requisite number of ballots in each state. Billionaire attorney and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy's running mate, has promised "a few surprises" with their own live broadcast.

Kennedy's campaign is in a critical moment. He previously announced that he raised less money in May than in any month this year, mainly due to Shanahan's decision to tap into less of her fortune. The noted vaccine skeptic is also in the thick of trying to qualify for the ballot in all 50 states.

A third-party presidential hopeful hasn't made a debate stage since 1992, so Kennedy's failure is far from unprecedented.

How is Trump approaching the debate?

After years of suggesting Biden is too feeble to do the job, Trump has been slightly complementary of the man who beat him in the 2020 election.

Republicans seem to recognize that setting the bar for Biden's performance at practically not dying on the stage is, uh, a low bar. So, instead, Trump is engaged in the very traditional game of trying to shape the media narrative before the showdown begins.

What about Biden?

Biden has spent days prepping for the debate at Camp David, the presidential retreat. History shows that incumbent presidents typically struggle in the first debate, a fact both President Obama and Trump can attest to. Biden's lawyer, Bob Bauer, is expected to reprise his role of playing the former president in mock debates. Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, who has prepped Democrats for general election debates for decades, is taking time off from his new perch at AirBnb to help as well.

What topics can we expect?

Only Tapper, Bash, and a few select people at CNN know the exact questions. That being said, a few issues seem almost guaranteed to come up. Polls show that Americans have deep concerns about Biden's age. Some national polls have also showed support for Trump dropping slightly in the wake of him becoming the first former president to be convicted of a felony. Tapper has also grilled Republicans, who, like Trump, continue to try to raise doubts about the 2020 election. The former president never directly conceded the race.

Trump's comeback campaign is also surging due to views about the US economy. Traditional metrics show Biden has much to be proud of, but while inflation has cooled, voters are still angry about high prices. Voters are also deeply skeptical of Biden's immigration policies, one of the biggest areas of disagreement between the two hopefuls.

Wasn't it possible there would be no debates?

Yes, that was a very real possibility. In 2022, The Republican National Committee formally withdrew from the Commission on Presidential Debates after years of tensions with the organization that has organized general election debates since 1988. It became an open question of how debates would move forward this time.

Trump, who easily dispatched his primary opponents, began goading Biden to debate him anyplace and anytime. In late April, Biden told radio host Howard Stern he would debate Trump. Weeks later, Biden's campaign delivered the final blow to the commission, confirming that Biden would not participate in any of its scheduled debates. The president's team said the debates had become too unruly and were scheduled too late in the calendar.

Trump and Biden then quickly agreed on the CNN debate and another contest in September, operating without any help from the commission. For now, the pair hasn't agreed to a third debate. Traditionally, the commission held two formal debates and one town-hall-style debate.

What's next after the debate?

Both sides are set to campaign on Friday. Biden will be in North Carolina. Trump will be in Virginia, a state that hasn't gone for the GOP in a presidential election since 2004. Trump is optimistic he can expand the list of potential swing states.

At least one more debate is on the calendar; ABC News will host a September 10 debate. Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump's yet-to-be-named running mate are also expected to debate. As of now, they haven't settled on one network to host that debate.

• ChatGPT put OpenAI at the forefront of the drive to build human-like AI.
• But the momentum of that hugely impactful launch has been tough to maintain.
• The company has had PR setbacks and development snags.

"Try talking with it here," Sam Altman wrote on X, linking to an "early demo" of ChatGPT.

He gave some thoughts on "language interfaces" and how people would soon "talk to the computer" with voice or text to get what they want, "for increasingly complex definitions of want!"

That thread marked what turned out to be one of the most impact launches in Silicon Valley history.

ChatGPT' prompted a surge of interest in generative AI. Tech giants like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Meta poured billions of dollars into the technology, and venture capitalists pumped even more into startups focusing on it.

It made OpenAI the poster child of the race to create human-like artificial general intelligence, which has become Altman's stated mission.

But getting there from the ChatGPT demo he debuted in November 2022 is a long road. Few would've mistaken the chatbot — with a tendency to hallucinate and get basic facts wrong — for a human. The company is struggling under the weight of expectations the initial launch created — and following up with launches as smooth and impactful is getting tougher.

Meanwhile, rivals like Google, Meta, and smaller companies have tried to catch up by unveiling their own AI models, such as Gemini Ultra and Llama 3.

OpenAI's new products have had issues

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it was delaying a highly anticipated upgrade to its chatbot's "voice mode" feature, which had been due for imminent release.

The existing voice feature, first introduced in September 2023, had suffered delays in responding to users' attempts to have a back-and-forth conversation and struggled to "directly observe tone," as well as multiple speakers and background noises, the company said.

The upgrade was set to roll out to a small group of ChatGPT Plus users in late June until the company announced it needed to work on "the model's ability to detect and refuse certain content" and to prepare "infrastructure to scale to millions while maintaining real-time responses."

The hiccup came after OpenAI made headlines when Scarlett Johansson accused the company of touting a voice — "Sky" — that, she claimed, was "eerily similar" to hers.

Though Altman later claimed it "was never intended to resemble" Johansson's, the company decided to pause using the voice.

The voice feature isn't the only one having a hard time.

OpenAI still has no release date for Sora, the model that generates videos based on users' text prompts and was first demonstrated publicly in February. In May, Google boss Sundar Pichai said OpenAI's training of Sora may have violated YouTube's terms and conditions.

Open AI released GPT-4o, its most advanced multimodal AI model and the successor to GPT-4, in May but rival AI lab Anthropic showed data on Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which it released last week, that suggest its model beats GPT-4o on "graduate-level reasoning," "code," and "reasoning over text" benchmarks.

According to Chatbot Arena, a widely followed performance table, Claude 3.5 Sonnet beat GPT-4o in coding. GPT-4o maintains the overall top spot on the table but only by a narrow margin.

This month did give OpenAI something to celebrate; Apple announced that it was partnering with the company to bring ChatGPT to iPhones, iPads, and Macs. This gives OpenAI access to Apple's huge install base of more than 2 billion active devices.

But OpenAI isn't getting paid for the integration, and Apple didn't guarantee exclusivity, as it has signaled it's open to partnering with other companies on AI.

ChatGPT gave OpenAI a headstart in the race to make AGI. But in a race that long, anyone could win.

• Another whistleblower has come forward with complaints of Boeing's safety lapses.
• Richard Cuevas said that he saw holes drilled improperly, which could lead to "catastrophe."
• The airplane mechanic said he was fired from his job shortly after raising concerns. 

Another Boeing whistleblower has come forward, saying that he witnessed 787 Dreamliner planes being built in a manner that could lead to a "catastrophe down the line."

Richard Cuevas was a Strom airplane mechanic who used to work as a contractor for Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems. He said that in 2023, he witnessed substandard manufacturing of the 787 planes' forward pressure bulkheads, which help maintain air pressure.

In a complaint filed by his lawyers on Tuesday to the Federal Aviation Administration, Cuevas said Spirit AeroSystems workers were drilling holes into the fasteners of the plane's forward pressure bulkhead, which were bigger than what Boeing had specified.

They did this to "clear excess paint from the holes and speed up a slow process," per the complaint. Cuevas said that the faults could lead to a loss of air pressure in the flight and run the risk of power failure.

However, in March, a few months after he reported his findings to Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems, he was fired from his job, the complaint said.

In a statement to CNN, Boeing said it had investigated Cuevas' concerns and determined that they were not safety threats.

"A subcontractor's employee previously reported concerns to us that we thoroughly investigated as we take seriously any safety-related matter," the company said to CNN. "Engineering analysis determined that the issues raised did not present a safety concern and were addressed."

Latest in a long list of Boeing whistleblowers

Cuevas is the latest whistleblower to allege that the aircraft manufacturer has been lax with safety and quality control.

A sprawling 204-page report by the Senate subcommittee investigating Boeing's safety and quality practices, released on June 17, cited accounts from numerous other whistleblowers.

These include Sam Mohawk, a quality assurance inspector for Boeing, who alleged that the company lost track of hundreds of faulty 737 parts and ordered staff to conceal improperly stored plane parts so that FAA inspectors would not see them.

Merle Meyers, a former Boeing quality manager, said that Boeing's manufacturing team regularly tried to retrieve bad parts from a "reclamation" area even after they were thrown out.

John Barnett, a Boeing manager turned whistleblower, said that safety procedures were ignored in the interest of speed and efficiency in building the planes.

Just days before he was supposed to give a deposition, Barnett was found dead from a"self-inflicted gunshot wound," the Charleston County coroner's office told BI's Matthew Loh. No further details were provided.

Boeing's troubles

Boeing planes have been plagued by technical issues in recent months.

On Saturday, a Korean Air 737 Max 8 flight bound for Taiwan had to turn back and make an emergency landing after detecting a fault with the aircraft's pressurization system.

Earlier in March, a United Airlines Boeing 777 taking off from San Francisco International Airport lost a tire just after takeoff, which crushed a car in the airport parking lot.

Most prominently, in January, a door plug came off a Boeing 737 Max 9 Alaska Airlines jet at 16,000 feet, resulting in a gaping hole in the plane.

Cuevas' lawyers and representatives of Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside regular working hours.

• Ayo Edibiri directed episode six on season three of "The Bear." 
• The actor said she tried her best to stay in a good mood and "talk decently to people" on set.
• Studies show that employees want to feel valued and appreciated at work.

Ayo Edebiri stepped into the director's chair for an episode on season three of "The Bear," and she says her focus was on bringing positive energy to the set.

"I tried my best to just be in a good mood, try to talk decently to people, because that I think can do a lot for how the workday flows," Edebiri told The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday.

Edebiri has won an Emmy, Golden Globe, and Critics Choice Award for her role as chef Sydney Adamu on "The Bear," where she acts alongside Jeremy Allen White.

In an interview with Variety in December, White, who plays chef Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto, explained that since the focus of the second season was on transforming The Original Beef of Chicagoland into an upscale restaurant named The Bear, there was less cooking on set.

"But now, in the third season, I think we're going to go back to that functioning kitchen atmosphere that we had in the first," he said.

Edebiri, a comedian, writer, producer, actor, and now director, said she turned to the show's creator Christopher Storer for inspiration while directing the episode. "Energy kind of goes from top down," she said, per The Hollywood Reporter.

And it's not just actors who need positive energy. Employees also want to feel valued and appreciated at work.

A 2021 study by the global management-consulting firm McKinsey found that one of the top reasons people quit their jobs is because they don't feel valued by their company or their manager.

"CEOs need to invest more time, energy, and resources into developing their culture, into developing their employees," Jasmine Hill, the CEO of Radiant Slate Consulting, told Business Insider.

Being pleasant to people at work has benefits at home, too. According to research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2018, behaving well at work can even help you sleep better.

• General Mills will boost product flavors to attract price-conscious customers amid inflation.
• The company said it expects little sales growth in the next year.
• General Mills' shares were down 4.6% at closing on Wednesday after it reported earnings.

General Mills is turning up the flavor to attract price-conscious customers.

The snack and cereal maker said it will improve the taste of some of its biggest products to boost sales as inflation continues to hit consumers.

"In tough economic times, consumers can't afford to waste, so they're looking for great-tasting products they know their family will eat," CEO Jeff Harmening said on an earnings call on Wednesday.

"Pillsbury biscuits will be flakier, Annie's mac and cheese will be cheesier, and Betty Crocker fudge brownies will be fudgier," Harmening said.

Sales growth for the year ending May 25 fell 1%. General Mills predicted sales growth for the next fiscal year to be between zero and 1%, below what investors expected.

General Mills' shares were down 4.6% at closing on Wednesday after the company reported earnings.

Americans are feeling the burden of rising prices at grocery stores and food items in general. They're buying fewer things in supermarkets and at fast-food restaurants alike, CEOs in both industries have said in recent months.

Along with higher-flavor iterations, General Mills' CEO said that the company will also introduce value or bulk packs on some products and will spend more on coupons — over 20% more in the next six months.

As part of its attempt to remain top-of-mind, General Mills is working with NFL stars Travis and Jason Kelce and comedian-actor Pete Davidson. The company is also sponsoring Canadian, British, and Australian athletes in the upcoming Olympics.

General Mills is not the only company that is being forced to get creative.

Earlier this year, rival breakfast giant Kellogg's faced backlash for encouraging cash-strapped shoppers to eat cereal for dinner. Some people noted that even if they were trying to save on groceries, they would not opt for relatively expensive name brands like Kellogg's.