The Future of Data: The Bloomberg Terminal Is Getting an AI Makeover (Wired)
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The Bloomberg Terminal has long inspired devotion, bordering on obsession. Among traders, the ability to chart a path through the software’s dizzying scrolls of numbers and text to isolate far-flung information is the mark of a seasoned professional.

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A greater mass of data is being fed into the Terminal—not only earnings and asset prices, but weather forecasts, shipping logs, factory locations, consumer spending patterns and private loans.

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"For years, Bloomberg has kept adding to this comprehensive dataset that we have," says Bloomberg's Chief Technology Officer Shawn Edwards. "Often, finding the right piece of data in the sea of information is the deciding factor in whether you’re successful or not ... You miss things, or it takes too long."

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To try to remedy the problem, Bloomberg is testing a chatbot-style interface for the Terminal, ASKB (pronounced ask-bee), built atop a basket of different language models. The broad idea is to help finance professionals condense labor-intensive tasks, and make it possible to test abstract investment theses against the data through natural language prompts.

Alongside Bloomberg's recent AI in Finance event at our London headquarters, Shawn spoke with Wired about the impetus for revamping the Terminal with AI. "The primary problem we’re solving with generative AI is helping users find key insights and synthesize a view of the world around a particular idea," he told Wired. 

Read the full conversation here. 

Bloomberg’s ASKB Roadmap: The Data Moat Behind the AI (A-Team Insight)

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Bloomberg’s roadmap is a clear statement of where it sees its own advantage: in the depth of its data, the breadth of its integrations, and the workflows its users already run on the Terminal.

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“We can imagine a world where there will be additional things these systems can do, but we expect the human to be the one directing,” says Wayne Barlow, Global Head of Terminal Products at Bloomberg. “Right now, those tasks are very much around gathering data, synthesizing data, and bringing that data back to the user to make decisions.” Read the full story here.

AI Edge: Bloomberg, the OG of Financial Data Firms, Has a Potent New AI Agent. How it Built it Holds Lessons for Other Companies (Fortune)

AskB allows users to use natural language to navigate the Terminal’s features and functions, but it does far more than this. The system acts as an agent, building investment screens and producing full research reports, including sophisticated financial modeling and bull and bear cases for a particular stocks, on the fly, Jeremy Kahn writes in Fortune.

"This kind of proactive, always-on agent is where a lot of businesses want to go. Bloomberg is showing some key steps along the path," Kahn writes.

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AI Meets City Hall

At Bloomberg CityLab in Madrid, Mike Bloomberg on Tuesday announced the launch of the Mayors AI Forum, a new global initiative bringing city leaders together to help shape how artificial intelligence is developed and deployed in communities around the world.

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Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how cities operate, with the potential to make daily life more affordable, efficient, and safe. But as local leaders move quickly to adopt new tools, they are also grappling with urgent questions around privacy, sustainability, and the future of work.

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That conversation is front and center in Madrid this week, where more than 1,000 city leaders gathered for Bloomberg CityLab, the global cities summit hosted by Bloomberg Philanthropies in partnership with the Aspen Institute.

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The Mayors AI Forum, launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies and Johns Hopkins University, brings together 10 founding mayors from around the world to accelerate practical uses of AI in government, work directly with companies as tools are designed, and help shape policy from the front lines of urban leadership.

The founding mayors represent 10 cities across eight countries and five continents, home to over 100 million residents. These major metropolises – which are innovation hubs and regional anchors – are among the advanced adopters of AI in public life: Bogotá, Boston, Buenos Aires, Kyiv, London, Madrid, Nairobi, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Tokyo. 

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The mayors of San Antonio, Nairobi, and Bogotá joined us for a discussion about how local leaders are using artificial intelligence to help run their cities — and how they are balancing residents’ concerns about privacy, environmental impact, and what increased use of AI could mean for the job market.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan and San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones appear on a Bloomberg CityLab panel, “Seizing the Opportunity of AI,” in Madrid on Tuesday. Photo: Bloomberg Philanthropies.

[Left] Mike Bloomberg delivering remarks at Bloomberg CityLab. [Right] Mike alongside Mayor Vitali Klitschko of Kyiv, Ukraine, one of the founding mayors of the Mayors AI Forum.

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“Mayors have often been early leaders on global challenges – even as national and international responses lagged,” Mike Bloomberg said. “Now, the Mayors AI Forum will help put them – and the communities they serve – at the forefront of conversations about the future of AI.”

Learn more about the forum here, as well as more from Bloomberg CityLab here. 

GPT-5.5 Has It All: OpenAI's New Model is a Top-End Senior Engineer, and It's Easy to Talk to (Every)
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Frontier models usually take a while to get used to. You have to learn their slow spots, when they need extra prompting, and when to keep a close eye on the output.

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GPT-5.5, OpenAI's latest release, feels easier to settle into. It’s fast enough to use constantly, personable enough to collaborate with, and assertive enough to carry a plan through serious engineering work.

It’s better at writing than any OpenAI model released in about a year, and it produced the strongest result seen on our new Senior Engineer Benchmark, according to Every, which measures how well models can rewrite a messy production codebase the way a senior engineer would. It’s rare for a model to feel easier and stronger at the same time.

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For a long time, OpenAI looked like it was trying to be everywhere at once: Sora for video, Atlas for browsing, consumer ChatGPT features, creative media tools, and whatever else might turn AI into the next mass-market platform.

GPT-5.5 is OpenAI’s clearest bid to reclaim the code-and-work narrative. It does not win everything. Opus 4.7 seems to write better plans and have a superior eye for design and product details. But GPT-5.5 is faster, steadier, and easier to trust for everyday professional work, according to Every. 

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What I'm Reading

Message from the Monarchy: King Charles Urges US Congress to Reject Pull of Isolationism in Landmark Speech (Bloomberg)

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King Charles III called on the US to maintain its leadership role in the world in a speech to Congress in which he highlighted NATO and urged “unyielding resolve” to defend Ukraine.

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Charles used his address to a joint session of Congress — the first such address by a British monarch in more than three decades — to argue for preserving the alliance between the UK and US. The king appealed to the shared heritage between the two nations, littering his remarks with references to culture, religion and the principles behind America’s decision to declare independence 250 years ago.

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“I pray with all my heart that our alliance will continue to defend our shared values, with our partners in Europe and the Commonwealth, and across the world, and that we ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking,” Charles told the assembled lawmakers, with Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson seated behind him.

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The speech on Capitol Hill came on the second of his four-day state visit, a trip that has thrust the king into an unusually prominent diplomatic role. The relationship between the US and the UK has fallen to its lowest level in decades amid a messy public feud between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

No Kings? US Will Issue Commemorative Passports with Trump’s Picture for America's 250th Birthday (Washington Post)
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The State Department said Tuesday that it is preparing a limited release of commemorative US passports celebrating America’s 250th birthday that feature a picture of President Donald Trump, who would be the first living president to be featured in the travel document.

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The concept for the special passport, including a rendering of Trump’s stern-looking visage, had been under consideration for months before finally being approved late Monday. The passports will be available at first only to applicants at the Washington, D.C., passport office and only on request. Applicants who do not want the commemorative passport will be able to choose a standard one, officials said.

A rendering of the passport portrait: 

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Retribution Round 2: Former FBI Director James Comey Indicted Again Under Trump (Bloomberg)
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Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted for a second time since Donald Trump returned to the White House last year.

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The charges were brought by prosecutors in North Carolina, marking the latest instance of prosecutors during the Trump administration pursuing criminal investigations against the president’s perceived political enemies.

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The indictment was related to a photo from last May that Comey posted on social media, in which the numbers 86 and 47 had been formed by seashells. Critics said that could have been a reference to killing Trump, the 47th president.

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Comey deleted the post at the time and said that was not his intent.

Bots Enter the Pentagon: Google Allows US Defense Department to Use Its AI in Classified Military Work (Bloomberg)

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Spain Sanctuary Push: Spain’s Premier Urges Cities to Give Sanctuary to Migrants (Bloomberg)

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez defended the country’s pro-migrant policies and called on other major cities around the world to become sanctuaries of diversity.

“I ask you to continue leading at the local level, always standing by your residents regardless of how long they’ve been registered or their country of origin,” Sánchez told a gathering of mayors from major cities at a Bloomberg Philanthropies event in Madrid.

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Spain in April launched a large-scale process through which the Socialist government expects to grant residency permits to around half a million people already living in the country without legal status. 

The initiative is unusual in Europe, where other countries have focused their efforts on deportation operations targeting undocumented migrants. In Spain, Sánchez is also facing opposition from the right-wing People’s Party and Vox, who seek to clamp down on migration.

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Pricing Fight: DeepSeek Slashes Fees for New AI Model in Chinese Price War (Bloomberg)

DeepSeek is aggressively pitching low-priced plans for its just-released flagship model, intensifying competition across a Chinese artificial intelligence industry trying to take on Silicon Valley’s best.

The Hangzhou-headquartered AI lab is offering a 75% discount to developers using the DeepSeek-V4-Pro, released last week after months of anticipation. It’s also reducing fees for input cache hits across its family of AI platforms to a tenth of their original pricing, dramatically lowering costs for frequent users sending similar or repeated requests.

Sale Scrapped: China Blocks Meta’s $2 Billion Acquisition of AI Firm Manus (Bloomberg)

China has decided to block Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of agentic AI startup Manus, a surprise move to unwind a controversial deal that’s drawn fire for the leakage of technology to the US.

The National Development and Reform Commission ordered the deal’s cancellation in a brief statement Monday. The powerful state planner said in a one-line notice that it had decided to prohibit foreign investment in the startup in accordance with laws and regulations, without elaborating.

The ruling is likely to send a chill through China’s burgeoning AI sector, and emerged weeks before a high-profile summit between Trump and China’s Xi Jinping.

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Beijing has tightened scrutiny of key industry firms in the wake of the deal, which has largely been completed. The sale was initially hailed as a template for startups with global aspirations, but domestic critics have since lamented the loss of valuable technology to a geopolitical rival.

Best of Late Night

On Trump's push to progress with the White House's new ballroom:

"The guy came from New York real estate and he thought he could build a ballroom without the permits? I'm on year three of trying to get my co-op board to approve my new doormat."
-- Seth Meyers 

"This is the first I'm hearing that it's a safe ballroom. All I've ever heard is how it's gonna be big and beautiful. But now we're shifting to safe?"
-- Seth Meyers 

On King Charles and Queen Camilla arriving in the US to begin a four-day visit for America's 250th anniversary:

"There was a huge misunderstanding when Charles invited Trump to tea time and Trump showed up with his golf bag."
-- Jimmy Fallon

And from John Oliver's 'Last Week Tonight': Some AI chatbots boast more than 800 million weekly users with many showing flaws ranging from unprompted flirtation with users to others encouraging people to open doomed-to-fail businesses.  Click below to watch.
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