Finance techie says they cloned Bloomberg's $30k-a-year Terminal with Perplexity's Computer — project draws both praise and sizable skepticism

The launch of Perplexity's Computer got quite a bit of attention from almost everyone with an interest in AI. The new product combines multi-model and multi-agent for both researching and autonomously executing complex tasks. Naturally, almost every techie put it to the test, including X user @hamptonism (Hampton). They claim to have needed but one afternoon to build a clone of Bloomberg's Terminal, going as far as saying "Perplexity just became the first Al company to truly go head-to-head with the Bloomberg Terminal."

Those are the pudgiest of bold claims, as the Terminal costs a few pennies at around $30,000 per year. It's also Bloomberg's bread-and-butter, representing about 85% of the firm's approximate $12 billion yearly revenue. Hampton showed a short clip of them operating their terminal clone, and it definitely resembles the Terminal's basic information and feeds, an impressive feat, at least apparently.

The effort drew immediate praise and no amount of AI hyperbole, borderline stating that Bloomberg is done for. The fact that it's possible today to build a tool of this caliber with an afternoon of talking to a bot is definitely eyebrow-raising, but as the saying goes, looks can be deceiving, and beauty only goes skin-deep.

Many users immediately pointed out that the data feed for Hampton's clone comes from Perplexity Finance, which itself is an AI bot that aggregates information from various sources. Ultimately, this means that the clone's "real time" information isn't quite so, even assuming that Perplexity Finance gets actual zero-delay, true real-time data to begin with, a doubtful fact on its own.

This fact is further highlighted by various comments noting that the true value of the Bloomberg Terminal is in its underlying real-time data provided directly by thousands of financial services. If Bloomberg's own words are an indication, its service covers "more than 200 billion pieces of financial data daily, [across] 6.5 million entities", presumably most if not all of it in true real time. That's a feat that Hampton's clone almost certainly cannot claim, whether for speed or for breadth of information.

Second, Terminal is a highly complex, highly customizable product, even coming with its own keyboard. Hampton's ticker/dashboard is impressive, but it's hard to believe that Terminal's estimated 30,000 function commands developed over four decades have all been replicated. Third, the Terminal is not only a highly evolved read-only dashboard — it's used to issue market orders of many types. Hampton themselves go over the Terminal's capabilities in a post.

There are a lot of positives in Hampton's effort, regardless, though. At its core, it's extraordinary that a few hours of quality time with a high-powered bot can yield this result as it is, and as they point out, it's a step towards democratizing access to financial analysis.

Moreover, anyone can ask the bot for the functions they need from the Terminal, as relatively few will need everything it can offer. The design can also evolve and be iterated upon with additional prompting, too. While it's quite hyperbolic to claim a bot can replicate the Bloomberg Terminal, it can be argued that with enough effort, folks can make a simplistic, skin-deep version of it that's enough for their needs.

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