An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: For its famous intractability, 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. But as a greater mass of data is fed into the Terminal -- not only earnings and asset prices, but weather forecasts, shipping logs, factory locations, consumer spending patterns, private loans, and so on -- valuable information is being lost. "It has become more and more untenable," says Shawn Edwards, chief technology officer at Bloomberg. "You miss things, or it takes too long." 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 to condense labor-intensive tasks, and make it possible to test abstract investment theses against the data through natural language prompts. As of publication, the ASKB beta is open to roughly a third of the software's 375,000 users; Bloomberg has not specified a date for a full release. Wired spoke with Edwards at Bloomberg's palatial London headquarters in early April, where he shared several examples of what ASKB can do. "With ASKB, I can create workflow templates. I can write a long query, and say, 'Hey, here's all the data I'm going to need. Give me a synopsis of the bull and bear cases, what the Street is saying, what the guidance is.' Now, I want to schedule [the workflows] or trigger them when I see this or that condition in the world." As for what separates mediocre traders from the best, assuming both have access to the same data, Edwards said: "These tools are not magical. They don't make an average [employee] all of a sudden great. The difference will be your ideas. In the hands of experts, it allows them to do better analysis, deeper research -- to sift through 10 great ideas when they might have only had time for one. If you're a mediocre analyst, they'll be 10 mediocre ideas."

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Google has reportedly signed a classified agreement allowing the Pentagon to use its AI models for "any lawful government purpose." While the deal is said to discourage domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons without human oversight, it apparently does not give Google the power to block how the government actually uses its models. The Verge reports: The agreement was reported less than a day after Google employees demanded CEO Sundar Pichai block the Pentagon from using its AI amid concerns that it would be used in "inhumane or extremely harmful ways." If the agreement is confirmed, it would place Google alongside OpenAI and xAI, which have also made classified AI deals with the US government. Anthropic was also among that list until it was blacklisted by the Pentagon for refusing the Department of Defense's demands to remove weapon and surveillance-related guardrails from its AI models. Citing a single anonymous source "with knowledge of the situation," The Information reports that the deal states that both parties have agreed that the search giant's AI systems shouldn't be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons "without appropriate human oversight and control." But the contract also says it doesn't give Google "any right to control or veto lawful government operational decision-making," which would suggest the agreed restrictions are more of a pinky promise than legally binding obligations.

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