Merluzzi said he’s interested in the uses of AI suited to the technology’s strengths, like recognizing patterns and summarizing large corpuses of text. He pointed to work by Stanford University’s Regulation, Evaluation and Governance Lab to help San Francisco to use large language models to parse its endless regulations and reporting requirements to identify unnecessary or redundant rules, and trim down its bureaucracy. City Attorney David Chiu told Politico that a tool the group developed for that task saved “countless hours of work.” The Reg Lab has similarly applied LLMs to the task of helping local governments remove racial covenants from their land deeds to meet state laws striving to remove the offensive passages from official records. (Some versions of the documents retain the covenants, for posterity.)

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