A Maryland court has ordered a blogger known as "Ziz", who leads a cult-like group connected to six killings, to be held without bail. The blogger, Jack LaSota, 34, of Berkeley, California, was arrested Sunday along with Michelle Zajko, 32, of Media, Pennsylvania, and Daniel Blank, 26, of Sacramento, California. The Zizians, as the group are known after their apparent leader, have been tied to the killing of a United States Border Patrol agent David Maland last month near the Canadian border, as well as five other killings in three states. LaSota, Zajko and Blank were arrested in Frostburg, Maryland, on Sunday afternoon. The judge in the case ordered LaSota to be held without bail, citing concerns about her being a flight risk and a danger to public safety.

Multi-modal open-domain question answering typically requires evidence retrieval from databases across diverse modalities, such as images, tables, passages, etc. Even Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 fall short in this task. To enable LLMs to tackle the task in a zero-shot manner, we introduce MoqaGPT, a straightforward and flexible framework. Using a divide-and-conquer strategy that bypasses intricate multi-modality ranking, our framework can accommodate new modalities and seamlessly transition to new models for the task. Built upon LLMs, MoqaGPT retrieves and extracts answers from each modality separately, then fuses this multi-modal information using LLMs to produce a final answer. Our methodology boosts performance on the MMCoQA dataset, improving F1 by +37.91 points and EM by +34.07 points over the supervised baseline. On the MultiModalQA dataset, MoqaGPT surpasses the zero-shot baseline, improving F1 by 9.5 points and EM by 10.1 points, and significantly closes the gap with supervised methods. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/lezhang7/MOQAGPT.

"The drone racing league is a sport. We do an annual season. We have a clear rule system and scoring system," Nick Horbaczewski, founder and CEO of the Drone Racing League (DRL), enthuses in a small business suite located on the second floor of the Circus Circus Casino in Las Vegas. With a deal with ESPN in the bag, his league is poised to bring the sport mainstream, and within moments of our introduction, he's let me know he's serious. Horbaczewski has delivered this pitch before; his whole business depends on it.

Amazon.com has set up model'smart' homes across the United States for shoppers to experience what it's like for voice aide Alexa to dim the lights, turn on the TV or order more laundry detergent. The rollout underscores how Amazon aims to make Alexa and the company's growing list of services, from shopping and entertainment to home security, an everyday part of consumers' lives. It also steps up competition with retailers such as Best Buy Co Inc that focus on showcasing technology and advising shoppers. Inside the Amazon house: An Amazon Echo Spot is seen on a bedside table in a bedroom in an Amazon'Experience center' in Vallejo, California. The so-called'Amazon Experience Centers' are now open near 15 cities including Los Angeles, Dallas and Washington, with more to come Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, said it has partnered with Lennar Corp to convert some of the home construction company's model homes into showrooms for Alexa.

The homes all come with WiFi, smart thermometers, lighting, doorbells and locks pre-installed, and Amazon's voice-activated Alexa personal assistant devices to run them. The experience centers offer customers the chance to interact with the technology in a real-life setting. Lennar announced Wednesday that standard features in its new homes will include built-in Wi-Fi, smart locks, doorbells, thermostats and lights -- all controlled by Alexa, Amazon's voice-activated digital assistant. Each house will come with two Alexa-enabled smart speakers, an Echo Show and an Echo Dot. New homeowners will also get a free visit from an Amazon technician to help set everything up and teach them how to use it.