California lawmakers passed roughly 1,200 bills last year, including some that resulted in unforeseeable wins by Republicans, promising protections for consumers and small strides for those in the entertainment industry. In the end, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed about 84% of the bills he received. Many of those laws take effect today, Jan. 1, as California rings in a new year. Cannabis cafes are legal: You can now hang out at dispensaries like you would a restaurant or cafe, thanks to AB 1775. The new law brings an Amsterdam-style approach to marijuana use, by allowing cannabis retailers to make and sell food and nonalcoholic beverages at what will be known as cannabis cafes or lounges.

The issue of hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) remains a critical barrier to the adoption of AI in enterprise and other high-stakes applications. Despite advancements in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, current state-of-the-art methods fail to achieve more than 80% accuracy in generating faithful and factually correct outputs, even when provided with relevant and accurate context. In this work, we introduce Acurai, a novel systematic approach that achieves 100% hallucination-free responses in LLMs by reformatting queries and context data prior to input. Leveraging a deep understanding of LLM internal representations, the importance of noun-phrase dominance, and the role of discrete functional units (DFUs), Acurai ensures alignment between input context and generated output. We validate this method using the RAGTruth corpus, demonstrating its ability to eliminate 100% hallucinations for both GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo. Acurai sets a new standard for achieving consistent, accurate, and faithful AI responses, marking a significant step forward in the development of trustworthy AI systems.

For the best part of 15 years, every June I would get on a plane to Los Angeles to cover E3. It was the giant video games conference where most of the major games and consoles of the past few decades were first shown, from the PlayStation to the Wii U, Fallout 4 to Final Fantasy VII Remake. Alas, the pandemic killed E3, and so this year we have a cluster of loosely affiliated and competing events instead: Summer Game Fest, run by Geoff Keighley of the Game Awards; the Xbox Games Showcase; indie-driven event Day of the Devs and many more. It all kicks off tomorrow, 6 June. The Guardian's journalism is independent.

It didn't take long for Harshraj Ghai to respond to the impact of California's new 20 an hour minimum wage for his 3,700 fast-food employees. Ghai and his family operate 180 Burger Kings, Taco Bells and Popeyes chicken restaurants across the state, and one of the first things they did after the law took effect April 1 was to start capping workers' hours to avoid overtime pay. Also, they're closing some outlets a little earlier, and opening others a bit later to avoid paying workers for less profitable periods. But the biggest thing Ghai and his family are doing does not directly involve workers at all: They've speeded up and expanded their use of technology, especially AI. With the state's mandatory minimum wage for fast-food workers set to increase to 20 an hour, many restaurant chains are preparing to raise prices.

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website for businesses (known as Requesters) to hire remotely located "crowdworkers" to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owned by Amazon.[1] Employers post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, or answering questions, among others. Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a rate set by the employer. To place jobs, the requesting programs use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site.[2] As of April 2019, Requesters could register from only 49 approved countries.[3]

Bank of America announced on Wednesday that it has raised its U.S. minimum hourly wage to $21, the next step in the company's plans to increase the pay to $25 by 2025. With employees getting paid $21 per hour, their annualized salary comes out to $43,680. In May, the company announced that all of its U.S. vendors were required to pay their employees dedicated to the bank at or above $15 per hour. The change comes in the midst of labor shortages taking place all over the United States, as companies struggle to hire and retain employees, especially for lower wage jobs. The increase would put Bank of America at roughly three times the U.S. minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

SMBs using the UZIO payroll system will no longer need to worry about maintaining federal, state, or local requirements for minimum wage on a "per paycheck" basis. The newest round of updates will allow employers to set minimum wage rates for employees, which the system will automatically compare against employee pay stubs. If the system determines an employee is receiving less than the required minimum wage, their compensation for that pay period will be adjusted accordingly to meet the mandated minimum. Since many states require employers to provide PTO information, UZIO has also implemented "Paid Time Off Details", an information field that is automatically generated on each employee paycheck, providing employees with their time accrued, used, and total PTO balances. Adding more to the payroll, UZIO has added a new feature where employers can modify the working hours of salaried employees from the default 40 hours to custom hours.

It's hard to believe that businesses that were fortunate enough to survive the pandemic are now facing another calamity. The labor shortage or wage shortage (depending on where you stand) could cripple the economic recovery efforts of the US as we head towards potential runaway inflation. The latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) is at 5 percent with no end to rising prices. Do others around the world see Americans as lazy, entitled teenagers pining for a better allowance? As of May 3, the World Health Organization states that the US was leading other countries in vaccination rates, while other countries like India continue to suffer.

The fast food giant has been testing out a Siri-like voice-recognition system at ten drive-thru locations in Chicago, CEO Chris Kempczinski revealed during a Wednesday investor conference attended by Nation's Restaurant News. The system can handle about 80 percent of the orders that come its way and fills them with about 85 percent accuracy -- probably annoying for the customers who just want to drive off with their burger -- but Kempczinski says a national rollout could happen in as soon as five years. It raises some interesting questions about the role that AI technology will play in various industries and, more importantly, the seemingly endless debate over whether raising the minimum wage to a livable salary will motivate CEOs to replace humans with machines -- or whether they'd do so to cut costs anyway. Part of the challenge in automating the drive-thru, Kempczinski said, is that human workers have been too eager to help out while supervising the technology that might one day replace them, preventing it from accruing the real-world data crucial for further improving the system. But as restaurant automation grows increasingly common, answering the question of how much responsibility a company has to continue employing people it could technically replace with machines will only grow more important and dire.

As US businesses begin to emerge from Covid, many are now facing a labor shortage crisis. After nearly 18 months of being locked down and vaccination rates increase, Americans are heading out in droves to their favorite restaurants, bars, and retail establishments. While this is a positive sign, it's presenting a big problem for businesses across the country as they struggle to keep up with the surge in demand. According to a May 6th, 2021 Department of Labor Report, 16.2 million are claiming unemployment benefits. Not all news is negative.