A question about whether Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) would challenge the 2024 election results quickly devolved into a fight about censorship and Big Tech during the debate with Democratic candidate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN).
Technology
JD Vance avoids January 6th questions by pivoting to Facebook ‘censorship’
“You have said you would not have certified the last presidential election, and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal,” moderator Norah O’Donnell asked Vance. “Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every governor certifies the results?”
Vance said that instead of the threats to democracy decried by Democrats, what’s really worrying is the threat of “big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens.” Vance says Harris would like to “censor people who engage in misinformation,” and that’s “a much bigger threat to democracy than anything we’ve seen” in the last four or 40 years.
“Kamala Harris is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale,” Vance said, adding that’s a much larger threat than former President Donald Trump telling people to protest “peacefully” on January 6th at the US Capitol insurrection. Vance compared Trump’s refusal to believe the results of the 2020 election to Democrats’ concerns about Russian foreign interference in the 2016 election, where they pointed to foreign agents’ purchasing of Facebook ads as contributing to Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump. (A Republican-led Senate committee concluded in 2020 that Russia did seek to interfere in the 2016 election to benefit Trump’s candidacy.)
“January 6th was not Facebook ads,” Walz retorted, calling Vance’s version of events “revisionist history.”
“January 6th was not Facebook ads”
Vance was apparently alluding to the events behind Murthy v. Missouri, a Supreme Court case decided earlier this year. The case covered accusations that the Biden administration coerced tech platforms to engage in censorship. Justices ruled in the Biden administration’s favor based on standing, but they also cast doubt on whether there was a meaningful connection between government outreach to platforms like Facebook and those platforms’ later moderation decisions.
Walz attempted to redirect the debate back to the original question. “Did he lose the 2020 election?” he asked Vance.
“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied. “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?”
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.
“It’s a damning non-answer for you not to talk about censorship,” Vance retorted.
At another point, Vance accused Harris of wanting to “use the power of government and Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds.” Trump himself recently suggested that some people “should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices,” referring to criticism of the Supreme Court.
Walz responded to Vance with the widely used but misleading claim that “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” is a Supreme Court test for unprotected speech. Vance didn’t dispute the premise, but he claimed “you guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers shouldn’t wear masks. That’s not fire in a crowded theatre. That is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American.”
“I don’t run Facebook,” Walz said. “This is not a debate, it’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world.”
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Traditional retailers have a pressing problem. Fast-moving like Shein and Temu are eating their lunch by leveraging purpose-built, end-to-end supply chains. Meanwhile, incumbent retailers are still stuck on legacy platforms, juggling a myriad number of data sets, and struggling to respond to a punishingly fast market.
A London-based startup thinks it has the solution to this problem. Ameba claims to be able to the unstructured data in a retailer’s supply chain systems, sprinkle in some generative AI, and make the whole thing more efficient.
The startup has now raised a $7.1 million seed round led by London-based VC firm Hedosophia, which has gained a reputation for rarely revealing which companies it invests in. TechCrunch reached out to the latter for further comment, but did not receive a response before publication.
Ameba’s platform uses generative AI on top of existing supply chain software to give retailers insights into their global supply chains, extracting data from a wide range of sources in order to predict disruptions and react to bottlenecks. The company claims it can reduce manual data input by 30%.
“In supply chains, particularly in the fashion consumer space, a lot of very important data is currently not being captured,” Ameba’s founder, Cedrik Hoffmann, told TechCrunch. “A lot of times, the things that are in the shops are sold at the wrong cost or they’re out of stock, or whatever.”
He said Ameba captures these unstructured data points that cost systems don’t: “We release that information from the information silos, bring them to a central source and surface the insights that are developed from them to the relevant parties within your organization.”
Co-founder Craig Massie said their underlying AI mixes a range of foundational models, including Open AI’s: “It changes depending on the task at hand and what performs best in our benchmarks for that task. The underlying constant across our AI usage is our multi-step agents — they can take actions, explore your ontology and its connections, read your supplier emails, WhatsApps and attachments.”
So far, British interior hardware and lighting company Plank has used Ameba to generate 140 alerts highlighting critical production and delivery delays that would have previously been missed or overlooked.
Before Ameba, Hoffman was the former supply chain director and co-founder of e-commerce company VALOREO, while Massie is a former Palantir engineer.
Also participating in the funding round were Visionaries Club, which previously led Ameba’s pre-seed round, and Anamcara Capital.
Isabella Yamamoto, principal at Visionaries Club, said in a statement, “After speaking to many supply chain owners, we were convinced that Cedrik and Craig had the experience to build a disruptive business using AI to eliminate fragmentation in supply chains and unlock competitive advantage for brands.”
Microsoft is releasing a new version of Office this week, designed for people that don’t want to subscribe to Microsoft 365. The standalone Microsoft Office 2024 release is now available for both consumers and small businesses, and includes locked-in-time versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook across both Mac and PC.
Office 2024 includes a lot of the updates that Microsoft has been delivering to Microsoft 365 subscribers over the past few years. Microsoft last released a standalone version of Office in 2021, and this new Office 2024 release includes improvements to the core apps, as well as accessibility and UI changes.
Office 2024 has a new default theme, with Microsoft’s latest Fluent Design principles that match the visual changes to Windows 11. Microsoft has also added accessibility-focused improvements to help Office users find potential accessibility issues in documents, slideshows, workbooks, and emails.
The biggest changes in Office 2024 can be found in Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Microsoft has added new functions in Excel to use text and arrays in worksheets, alongside a new IMAGE function that can pull pictures from the web. Excel 2024 can also now reference Dynamic Arrays in charts, which can automatically update rather than being fixed to set data points. Microsoft claims the overall speed and stability of Excel 2024 should also be improved.
In PowerPoint Microsoft has added the cameo feature, allowing you to insert a live camera feed into slides. PowerPoint also has a new recording studio feature that includes recording features for narration, animations, transitions, and inking. You can also add closed captions or subtitles to videos and audio files in slides, making presentations a lot more accessible.
Outlook 2024 includes improvements to search so you get more relevant results for messages, attachments, contacts, and calendar entries. This latest Outlook release also includes more options for meetings, including the ability to automatically shorten them. Mac users can also customize swipe left and right gestures in Outlook.
In Word, Excel, and PowerPoint you can now insert a picture easily from an Android mobile device, and Microsoft is also supporting version 1.4 of the OpenDocument format (ODF) which includes a variety of new improvements. Word and PowerPoint also include the ability to like and react to comments in documents.
Word 2024 users will also be able to recover a session if your PC crashes. Word will automatically open all the documents you had open before your PC crashed, you lost power, or Word simply closed unexpectedly. OneNote 2024 users will also get access to the new inking and drawing experience.
Microsoft says Office 2024 will require a Microsoft account and an internet connection, but if it’s anything like Office 2021 then you’ll only need an internet connection to install the suite, activate it, and get any security updates. Office 2024 will run on Windows 10 and 11 as well as the three most recent releases of macOS.
Office 2024 will be available in two different editions. Office Home 2024, priced at $149.99, includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for PC or Mac. If you want Outlook, you’ll need to purchase the $249.99 Office Home and Business 2024 version, which also includes the rights to use the apps for commercial purposes.
Despite ongoing interest surrounding artificial intelligence technologies embedded into work environments, UK businesses are still prioritizing hiring workers with basic technical skills.
New research by Indeed found only 2.6% of job postings in the UK mentioned AI skills, with basic skills like Microsoft Office and generic IT expertise coming up more frequently.
According to the report, the most common technical skills sought by UK employers include generic IT skills (10%), Microsoft Office (6%) and Microsoft Excel (5%). Moreover, demand for basic IT skills has remained pretty consistent over the past five years, both in the UK and in other markets like the US.
UK businesses need basic IT skills more than AI
Besides tech skills, Indeed found that UK employers are also prioritizing human skills like communication (30%), leadership (9%) and organization (7%).
Moreover, Indeed’s research into the current state of the UK jobs market tackles ongoing concern that AI could replace human workers. The analysis of over 2,800 work skills found that two-thirds (68.7%) are ‘very unlikely’ or ‘unlikely’ to be replaced by generative AI.
“While AI and other advanced technologies are likely to shape the future labour market, the current reality is that many employers are simply seeking workers with basic computer skills,” commented Indeed Senior Economist Jack Kennedy.
“While AI may eventually necessitate a broad upskilling across the workforce to embrace advanced technologies, there remains a more pressing concern around closing basic digital skills gaps and allowing everyone to fully engage with work in the digital age.”
This is despite Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer’s ambitions to make the UK a global AI hub.
Despite the Prime Minister’s efforts, the current jobs market suggests businesses are not yet aligned with the vision, with employers still seeking fundamental tech skills and human competencies.
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