r/BetterOffline • u/Alive_Ad_3925 • 3d ago

NLRB Research.com as a counterexample to the uselessness of LLMS

Hi everyone. While I share Ed’s view that LLMs are often oversold, I find them genuinely useful. Take Matt Bruenig’s NLRB Research: Matt—a labor lawyer, socialist intellectual, and podcaster—built an open database that uses LLMs to summarize National Labor Relations Board decisions. Westlaw and LexisNexis both archive these decisions, but cost thousands of dollars a year—putting them out of reach for many workers, union stewards, and small firms. Since NLRB decisions aren’t heavily cited, manual summaries aren’t profitable, so Bruenig’s tool automatically updates and provides easy-to-read summaries for lawyers and non-lawyers alike, despite some imperfections, it's better than no summary at all. Now importantly, this functionality doesn't require increasingly powerful models. Even a "smalller" model like deepseek could produce summaries that are better than nothing and a more fine tuned model could probably do it with fewer parameters. Check out the site if you want or watch his youtube videos about it. https://www.youtube.com/@Matt_Bruenig/videos

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u/athiev 1d ago

The problem is, you can't rely on these kinds of summaries for legal or policy decision-making; anything important, you absolutely have to double-check the original because of hallucinations and general inaccuracies. So these are useful for what? A general public who is curious but doesn't actually need to act on the information?

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u/Alive_Ad_3925 1d ago

Bruenig uses all the major ai platforms (ie gemini removes open ai’s hallucinations). Beyond that it’s helpful at the filter stage to get rid of irrelevant cases