Technology

Bloomberg plans to integrate GPT-style A.I. into its terminal

Published

2 years ago

April 13, 2023

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Bloomberg computer terminal at the NYSE.

Adam Jeffery | CNBC

Bloomberg LP has developed an AI model using the same underlying technology as OpenAI’s GPT, and plans to integrate it into features delivered through its terminal software, a company official said in an interview with CNBC.

Bloomberg says that Bloomberg GPT, an internal AI model, can more accurately answer questions like “CEO of Citigroup Inc?”, assess whether headlines are bearish or bullish for investors, and even write headlines based on short blurbs.

Large language models trained on terabytes of text data are the hottest corner of the tech industry. Giants such as Microsoft and Google are racing to integrate the technology into their products, and artificial intelligence startups are regularly raising funds at valuations over $1 billion.

Bloomberg’s move shows how software developers in many industries beyond Silicon Valley see state-of-the-art AI like GPT as a technical advancement allowing them to automate tasks that used to require a human.

“Both the capabilities of GPT-3 and the way that it achieved its performance through language modeling wasn’t something that I expected,” said Gideon Mann, head of ML Product and Research at Bloomberg. “So when that came out, we were like, ‘OK, this is going to change the way that we do NLP here.'”

NLP stands for natural language processing, the part of machine learning that focuses on deriving meaning from words.

The move also shows how the AI market may not be dominated by giants with massive amounts of generalized data.

Building large language models is expensive, requiring access to supercomputers and millions of dollars to pay for them, and some have wondered if OpenAI and Big Tech companies would develop an insurmountable lead. In this scenario, they would be the winners, and simply sell access to their AIs to everybody else.

But Bloomberg’s GPT doesn’t use OpenAI. The company was able to use freely available, off-the-shelf AI methods and apply them to its massive store of proprietary — if niche — data.

So far, Bloomberg says its GPT shows promising results doing tasks like figuring out whether a headline is good or bad for a company’s financial outlook, changing company names to stock tickers, figuring out the important names in a document, and even answering basic business questions like who the CEO of a company is.

It also can do some “generative AI” applications, like suggesting a new headline based on a short paragraph.

One example in the paper:

Input: “The US housing market shrank in value by $2.3 trillion, or 4.9%, in the second half of 2022, according to Redfin. That’s the largest drop in percentage terms since the 2008 housing crisis, when values slumped 5.8% during the same period”

Output: “Home Prices See Biggest Drop in 15 Years.”

How it could be used

OpenAI’s GPT is often called a “foundational” model because it wasn’t intended for a specific task.

Bloomberg’s approach is different. It was specifically trained on a large number of financial documents collected by the firm over the years to create a model that’s especially fluent in money and business.

In contrast, OpenAI’s GPT was trained on terabytes of text, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with finance.

About half of the data used to create Bloomberg’s model comes from nonfinancial sources scraped from the web, including GitHub, YouTube subtitles, and Wikipedia.

But Bloomberg also added over 100 billion words from a proprietary dataset called FinPile, which includes financial data the firm has accumulated over the last 20 years, including securities filings, press releases, Bloomberg News stories, stories from other publications and a web crawl focused on financial webpages.

It turns out that adding specific training materials increased accuracy and performance enough on financial tasks that Bloomberg is planning to integrate its GPT into features and services accessed through the company’s Terminal product, although Bloomberg is not planning a ChatGPT-style chatbot.

One early application would be to transform human language into the specific database language that Bloomberg’s software uses.

For example, it would transform “Tesla price” into “(get(px_last) for([‘TSLA US Equity’])”.

Another possibility would be for the model to do behind-the-scenes work cleaning data and doing other errands on the application’s back end.

But Bloomberg is also looking at using artificial intelligence to power features that could help financial professionals save time and stay on top of the news.

“There’s a lot of work we’re doing to help clients address that data deluge of news stories, whether that’s through summarization, or monitoring, or being able to ask questions on those news stories or transcripts. There are a lot of applications there,” Mann said.

Technology

Firefly Aerospace sets IPO range that would value rocket maker at $5.5 billion

Published

3 hours ago

July 28, 2025

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Firefly Aerospace sets IPO range that would value rocket maker at .5 billion

Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim sits for an interview at the Firefly Aerospace mission operations center in Leander, Texas, on July 9, 2025.

Sergio Flores | Reuters

Firefly Aerospace will price shares at $35 to $39 each in its upcoming initial public offering, a deal that would value the rocket maker at about $5.5 billion.

The Texas-based space company said in an updated prospectus Monday that it’s planning to sell about 16.2 million shares. The offering could raise up to $631.8 million.

Earlier this month, Firefly filed its plans to go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “FLY.”

Its debut comes amid a renewed push in the space race, as billionaire-led companies such as Elon Musk‘s SpaceX funnel more money into space activities and startups try their luck at the public markets.

Space tech firm Voyager went public in June, while reusable rocket developer Innovative Rocket Technologies said it plans to debut through a $400 million special purpose acquisition company merger.

Figma raises IPO range to $30-$32 per share, in deal that could value company at nearly $19 billion

Published

4 hours ago

July 28, 2025

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Figma raises IPO range to - per share, in deal that could value company at nearly billion

Elena Nadolinski, founder and CEO at Iron Fish, and Dylan Field, CEO and co-founder of Figma, attend the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 7, 2022.

Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters

Design software maker Figma on Monday increased the expected price range for shares in its initial public offering this week.

The company now expects shares to go for $30 to 32 each, up from the range of $25 to $28 that it disclosed on July 21.

The new range, announced in a regulatory filing, suggests Figma would be worth $17.6 billion to $18.8 billion on a fully diluted basis.

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Figma files to go public under ticker 'FIG'

Technology

Huawei reclaims No. 1 smartphone spot in China — and Apple returns to growth

Published

10 hours ago

July 28, 2025

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Huawei reclaims No. 1 smartphone spot in China — and Apple returns to growth

The Huawei flagship store and the Apple flagship store at Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street in Shanghai, China, Sept. 2, 2024.

Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images

Huawei reclaimed the top spot in China’s smartphone market in the second quarter of the year, while Apple returned to growth in the country — one of its most critical markets — data released by technology market analyst firm Canalys showed on Monday.

Huawei shipped 12.2 million smartphones in China in the three months ended June, a rise of 15% year on year — equating to 18% market share. It’s the first time Huawei has been the biggest player by market share in China since the first quarter of 2024, according to Canalys.

Apple, meanwhile, shipped 10.1 million smartphones in the quarter in China, up 4% year on year and ranking fifth. It is the first time Apple has recorded growth in China since the fourth quarter of 2023, Canalys said.

Shipments represent the number of devices sent to retailers. They do no equate directly to sales but are a gauge of demand.

The numbers come ahead of Apple’s quarterly earnings release this week, with investors watching the company’s performance in China, a market where the Cupertino giant has faced significant challenges, including intense competition from Huawei and other local players such as Xiaomi.

Huawei, which made a comeback at the end of 2023 after its smartphone business was crippled by U.S. sanctions, has eaten away at Apple’s share.

Apple’s return to growth in China will be a welcome sign for investors. The U.S. tech giant “strategically adjusted its pricing” for the iPhone 16 series in China, which helped it grow, Canalys said. Chinese e-commerce firms discounted Apple’s iPhone 16 models during the quarter. And Apple itself also increased trade-in prices for some iPhone models.

Canalys’ numbers back up figures released by Counterpoint Research earlier this month showing Apple’s return to growth in China.

Shares of Apple have fallen around 14.5% this year, partly on concerns over China and geopolitical headwinds.

Key questions for Apple ahead of earnings

U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened Apple with tariffs and urged CEO Tim Cook to manufacture iPhones in America, a move experts have said would be near impossible.

Meanwhile, competition in China has intensified. Huawei has aggressively launched various smartphones in the past year and has started to roll out HarmonyOS 5, its self-developed operating system, across various devices. It is a rival to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

“This move is expected to accelerate the expansion of its independent ecosystem’s user base, while also placing greater demands on system compatibility and user experience,” Lucas Zhong, analyst at Canalys, said in a press release.