This paper provides an experimental evaluation of the capability of large language models (LLMs) to assist in legal decision-making within the framework of Austrian and European Union value-added tax (VAT) law. In tax consulting practice, clients often describe cases in natural language, making LLMs a prime candidate for supporting automated decision-making and reducing the workload of tax professionals. Given the requirement for legally grounded and well-justified analyses, the propensity of LLMs to hallucinate presents a considerable challenge. The experiments focus on two common methods for enhancing LLM performance: fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In this study, these methods are applied on both textbook cases and real-world cases from a tax consulting firm to systematically determine the best configurations of LLM-based systems and assess the legal-reasoning capabilities of LLMs. The findings highlight the potential of using LLMs to support tax consultants by automating routine tasks and providing initial analyses, although current prototypes are not ready for full automation due to the sensitivity of the legal domain. The findings indicate that LLMs, when properly configured, can effectively support tax professionals in VAT tasks and provide legally grounded justifications for decisions. However, limitations remain regarding the handling of implicit client knowledge and context-specific documentation, underscoring the need for future integration of structured background information.

The gradient descent algorithm is an approach to find the minimum point or optimal solution for a given dataset. It follows the steepest descent approach. That is it moves in the negative gradient direction to find the local or global minima, starting out from a random point. We use gradient descent to reach the lowest point of the cost function. In Machine Learning, it is used to update the coefficients of our model.

Artificial Intelligence is already impacting Manufacturing, Retail, Marketing, Healthcare, Food industries and more. Today we will take an in-depth look at another industry, that with proper AI expertise from development companies could be disrupted. Transportation is an industry that helps humanity with moving people their belongings from one location to the other. While doing that, this industry had experienced countless twists, turns, breakthroughs, and setbacks to get to the place where it is now. The year 1787 was the defining one for this industry because steamboat was introduced and changed everything.