Bloomberg has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool called BloombergGPT that has been specifically trained on financial data to assist with natural language processing (NLP) tasks within the finance industry. The AI program can analyze financial data quickly to assist with making risk assessments, judge financial sentiment, and potentially even automate accounting and auditing tasks. BloombergGPT was trained using a comprehensive 363 billion token dataset consisting of English financial documents, as well as general-purpose datasets, resulting in the creation of a new 50-billion parameter decoder-only AI program. BloombergGPT will have access to the vast amount of data available on the Bloomberg Terminal, which is used by financial professionals to access real-time market data, breaking news, financial research, and analytics.
Shawn Edwards, Bloomberg’s Chief Technology Officer, said that "BloombergGPT will enable us to tackle many new types of applications, while it delivers much higher performance out-of-the-box than custom models for each application, at a faster time-to-market." Gideon Mann, Head of Bloomberg’s ML Product and Research team, explained that "thanks to the collection of financial documents Bloomberg has curated over four decades, we were able to carefully create a large and clean, domain-specific dataset to train a LLM that is best suited for financial use cases." BloombergGPT is expected to improve existing NLP workflows and offer new ways to assist customers.
While this development is exciting, some may be concerned about the potential impact of AI on employment. The finance industry has already seen significant job losses due to automation, and the introduction of AI tools like BloombergGPT could lead to more job losses. However, it's important to note that AI can also create new jobs and opportunities. Overall, BloombergGPT has the potential to revolutionize the finance industry by providing real-time analysis of financial data and assisting with a variety of important tasks.