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

Waymo plans to bring its robotaxi service to Dallas in 2026

Published

5 hours ago

July 29, 2025

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Waymo plans to bring its robotaxi service to Dallas in 2026

A Waymo rider-only robotaxi is seen during a test ride in San Francisco, California, U.S., December 9, 2022.

Paresh Dave | Reuters

Alphabet’s Waymo unit plans on bringing its robotaxi service to Dallas next year, adding to a growing list of prospective U.S. markets for 2026, including Miami and Washington, D.C.

Rental car company Avis Budget Group will be managing the Waymo fleet in Dallas, via a new partnership the companies announced Monday.

Avis CEO Brian Choi said in a statement that the agreement marks a “milestone” for the company, which is now also working to become “a leading provider of fleet management, infrastructure and operations to the broader mobility ecosystem.”

Waymo robotaxi testing is already underway in downtown Dallas involving the company’s Jaguar I-PACE electric vehicles with the Waymo Driver system. That combines automated driving software, sensors and other hardware that power the vehicles’ “level 4,” driverless operations.

Passengers will be able to hail a driverless ride using the Waymo app in Dallas. In some other markets, Waymo only makes its services available through ride-hailing platform Uber.

Waymo has surged ahead in the robotaxi market while other autonomous vehicle developers, including Tesla, Amazon-owned Zoox, and venture-backed startups such as Nuro, May Mobility and Wayve, are working to make autonomous transportation a commercial reality in the U.S.

Waymo says it conducts more than 250,000 paid weekly trips in the markets where it operates commercially, including Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.

Waymo’s steepest competition internationally comes from Baidu’s robotaxi venture Apollo Go in China, which is eyeing expansion in Europe.

On Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings call, execs boasted that, “The Waymo Driver has now autonomously driven over 100 million miles on public roads, and the team is testing across more than 10 cities this year, including New York and Philadelphia.”

The business has become significant enough that Alphabet even added a category to its Other Bets revenue description in its latest quarterly filing.

“Revenues from Other Bets are generated primarily from the sale of autonomous transportation services, healthcare-related services and internet services,” the filing said.

The Other Bets segment remains relatively small, however, with revenue coming in at $373 million in the quarter, up from $365 million a year ago. The division still reported a loss of $1.25 billion, widening from $1.13 billion in the second quarter of 2024.

WATCH: Waymo co-CEO on 10 million driverless rides and Tesla’s coming robtaxi challenge

Waymo co-CEO on 10 million driverless rides and Tesla’s coming robotaxi challenge

Technology

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses revenue tripled over the year, EssilorLuxottica says

Published

7 hours ago

July 28, 2025

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Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses revenue tripled over the year, EssilorLuxottica says

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses on display in the window of a Ray Ban store in London, UK, on Friday, July 19, 2024.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Revenue from sales of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses more than tripled year over year, EssilorLuxottica revealed Monday as part of the company’s most recent earnings report.

EssilorLuxottica said the success of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, built via a partnership with the Facebook parent stemming back to 2019, contributed to its first-half overall sales of 14.02 billion euro (US$16.25 billion), which represents a 7.3% year-over-year jump.

“We are leading the transformation of glasses as the next computing platform, one where AI, sensory tech and a data-rich healthcare infrastructure will converge to empower humans and unlock our full potential,” EssilorLuxottica CEO Francesco Milleri and deputy CEO Paul du Saillant said in a joint-statement. “The success of Ray-Ban Meta, the launch of Oakley Meta Performance AI glasses and the positive response to Nuance Audio are major milestones for us in this new frontier.”

In the earnings report, the company said that its new Oakley Meta smart glasses, unveiled in June, represents the latest product line to come from its partnership with the social media company. CNBC reported in June that Meta and Luxottica plan to debut a Prada-branded version of its smart glasses in the future.

Luxottica owns several well-known brands including Ray-Ban, Oakley, Vogue Eyewear and Persol.

In September, Meta renewed a long-term partnership agreement with Luxottica to “collaborate into the next decade to develop multi-generational smart eyewear products,” according to the announcement.

WATCH: Meta’s ambitious AI plans.

Meta's ambitious AI plan to build superintelligence will soak up massive energy, resources

Technology

MicroStrategy copycats are getting out of control as Canadian vape company joins fray

Published

9 hours ago

July 28, 2025

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MicroStrategy copycats are getting out of control as Canadian vape company joins fray

The logos of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether outside a cryptocurrency exchange in Istanbul, Turkey, on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024.

David Lombeida | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The crypto market’s bullishness may be tipping into speculative frenzy, if the latest MicroStrategy-style copycat is any indication.

On Monday, a little-known Canadian vape company saw its stock surge on plans to enter the crypto treasury game – but this time with Binance Coin (BNB), the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, excluding the dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether (USDT), according to CoinGecko.

Shares of CEA Industries, which trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker VAPE, rocketed more than 800% at one point after the company announced its plans. CEA, along with investment firm 10X Capital and YZi Labs, said it would offer a $500 million private placement to raise proceeds to buy Binance Coin for its corporate treasury. Shares ended the session up nearly 550%, giving the company a market cap of about $48 million.

Given the more crypto-friendly regulatory environment this year, more public companies have adopted the MicroStrategy playbook of using debt financing and equity sales to buy bitcoin to hold on their balance sheet to try to increase shareholder returns, pushing bitcoin to new records.

Now, with the S&P 500 trading at new records, the resurgence of meme mania and a pro-crypto White House supporting the crypto industry, investors are looking further out on the risk spectrum of crypto hoping for bigger gains.

In recent months, investors have rotated out of bitcoin and into ether, which led to a burst of companies seeking a similar treasury strategy around ether. SharpLink Gaming, whose board is chaired by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, was one of the first to make the move. Other companies like DeFi Development Corp, renamed from Janover, are making similar moves around Solana.