[HN Gopher] Google's 200M-parameter time-series foundation model...
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       Google's 200M-parameter time-series foundation model with 16k
       context
        
       Author : codepawl
       Score  : 285 points
       Date   : 2026-03-31 05:21 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | Foobar8568 wrote:
       | Somehow I missed that one. Are there any competition on this?
       | 
       | I always had difficulties with ML and time series, I'll need to
       | try that out.
        
         | rockwotj wrote:
         | https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-time-series-foundatio...
         | 
         | https://moment-timeseries-foundation-model.github.io/
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07815
         | 
         | A friend at work used one to predict when our CEO would post in
         | Slack, which is verry entertaining to see if correct.
        
           | Foobar8568 wrote:
           | Many thanks for the links!
        
         | chwzr wrote:
         | there is TabPFN [1] which also has time series capabilities.
         | 
         | [1] https://priorlabs.ai/tabpfn
        
         | _1 wrote:
         | https://www.opentslm.com/
        
         | bitshiftfaced wrote:
         | There are some other transformer based models on the GIFT
         | leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Salesforce/GIFT-Eval
        
       | EmilStenstrom wrote:
       | Here is the link to the blogpost, that actually describe what
       | this is: https://github.com/google-research/timesfm?tab=readme-
       | ov-fil...
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | That takes me to the same content as the submission, a GitHub
         | repo (Chrome on iOS)
        
           | rockwotj wrote:
           | Probably the better link:
           | https://research.google/blog/a-decoder-only-foundation-
           | model...
        
             | akshayshah wrote:
             | And https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.10688 if you want the full
             | paper.
        
           | Cyuonut wrote:
           | I suppose they tried to link this:
           | https://research.google/blog/a-decoder-only-foundation-
           | model...
        
         | nels wrote:
         | I think you meant to link this page:
         | https://research.google/blog/a-decoder-only-foundation-model...
        
         | OliverGuy wrote:
         | Wish they gave some numbers for total GPU hours to train this
         | model, seems comparatively tiny when compared to LLMs so
         | interested to know how close this is to something trainable by
         | your average hobbyist/university/small lab
        
           | OliverGuy wrote:
           | Edit, it looks like the paper does
           | 
           | TPUv5e with 16 tensor cores for 2 days for the 200M param
           | model.
           | 
           | Claude reckons this is 60 hours on a 8xA100 rig, so very
           | accessibile compared to LLMs for smaller labs
        
       | EmilStenstrom wrote:
       | I somehow find the concept of a general time series model
       | strange. How can the same model predict egg prices in Italy, and
       | global inflation in a reliable way?
       | 
       | And how would you even use this model, given that there are no
       | explanations that help you trust where the prediction comes
       | from...
        
         | teruakohatu wrote:
         | What is not generally understood is that these models don't
         | predict egg prices or inflation in Italy.
         | 
         | They decompose a time series into trends, seasonality and
         | residuals. That's what they are actually modelling.
         | 
         | They cannot predict wars in the Middle East influencing
         | inflation unless there is a seasonal pattern(s).
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | ARIMA and ARMA models
        
           | d--b wrote:
           | The main issue is that people do use them to predict bitcoin
           | prices intraday and that sort of things.
        
             | nico wrote:
             | Is it an issue because it works, or because it doesn't? Or
             | because it's bitcoin?
             | 
             | I genuinely want to know. Thank you
        
               | d--b wrote:
               | It is an issue because bitcoin is highly unpredictable.
               | 
               | These tools are good at predicting timeseries that are in
               | fact quite predictable. Like insurances will use this to
               | estimate the number of people who will die from cancer in
               | the next year, the year after that, and so on up to 50
               | years in the future. The model will extrapolate the
               | progresses made in cancer treatment from the current
               | trend, etc. It is a prediction, cause it's still possible
               | that a breakthrough comes in and suddenly people don't
               | die from a certain form of cancer, but generally it
               | should be roughly correct.
               | 
               | Bitcoin prices are a lot more chaotic, influenced by a
               | ton of unrelated events that shape its path a certain
               | way. There is absolutely no certainty that studying the
               | shape of its past evolution will help in any way
               | understand its future evolution.
               | 
               | Of course here I mean by studying its price alone. If you
               | add more information, like who's behind each trend and
               | why, you have a much better sense of what could happen
               | next.
        
           | cybrox wrote:
           | Wars in the middle east seem to have increasingly regular
           | patterns tied to stock market opening hours, unfortunately.
        
             | rubyn00bie wrote:
             | I totally agree with the sentiment but from what I can
             | tell, I'd say they tend happen immediately before or after
             | markets open _and_ close. Essentially, and to their
             | maximum, screwing absolutely everyone who isn't in the
             | clique from participating in the trade.
             | 
             | FWIW-- the only sure fire way to win the trade is to buy
             | time and assume both gross incompetence and negligence when
             | it comes action. The only caveat is if the markets tank
             | enough, this administration will signal capitulation before
             | hand, e.g. Trump mildly capitulating on tariffs last April
             | after the markets proceed to relentlessly defecate
             | themselves.
             | 
             | 0-DTE options are typically, and for good reason, stupid
             | gambles. But, right now they can't even be considered
             | gambling, because there's zero chance of winning. Not just
             | bad odds, but no odds. Again just signaling how truly
             | malicious this admin is and its disdain for anyone and
             | everyone not close to them.
        
             | jofzar wrote:
             | I mean it's super obvious, it's directly tied to scrubs
             | popularity.
             | 
             | New season of scrubs = new war in the middle east.
        
               | FartyMcFarter wrote:
               | Wow, I didn't know. Thank you! Such a great show.
        
               | jofzar wrote:
               | It's suprisingly good, like it's it's 100% worth watching
               | if you liked scrubs.
        
           | perks_12 wrote:
           | I am not familiar with time series models, but judging from
           | your answer, it would be necessary to feed long time series
           | into this model for it to detect trends. What is a token
           | here? Can it, for the lack of a better example, take in all
           | intraday movements of a stock for a day, a week, a month,
           | etc?
        
             | teruakohatu wrote:
             | I tend to avoid time series forecasting when I can help it
             | because I find it hard to communicate to stakeholders that
             | a neural network (or another method) is not an oracle.
             | 
             | If you are talking about granularity of observations, it
             | would depend on what you are trying to predict (the price
             | in an hour or the price in 12 months?) and how quickly you
             | need the prediction (100ms? Tomorrow morning?). If I had
             | infinite data I would use granularity as a hyper parameter
             | and tune that to a level that produced the best test
             | results.
             | 
             | I am for example currently using weekly averages for non-
             | price data forecasting. I could use daily data but weekly
             | is absolutely adequate for this purpose.
        
               | ghywertelling wrote:
               | You can use lightgbm with appropriate feature
               | engineering.
        
           | ReptileMan wrote:
           | It is the Middle East. Wars are always in season. And supply
           | is more than the demand.
        
           | lordgrenville wrote:
           | That's what traditional time-series modelling does. This is a
           | foundational model, which means it's just a neural network
           | trained on lots of time series. (So maybe OP's question still
           | stands? But it's the same question as "how can LLMs be good
           | at so many different kinds of conversations?")
        
             | dist-epoch wrote:
             | Because traditional time-series modelling (ARIMA, GARCH,
             | ...) is too "simple" and "strict". Just like "simple"
             | computer vision (OpenCV, edge-detection, ...) was crushed
             | by neural networks when having to deal with real world
             | images.
        
               | robot-wrangler wrote:
               | This seemed like a good answer at first. But on further
               | thought, images on the whole really do seem to have quite
               | a bit more standard structure / "grammar" to exploit
               | compared to arbitrary time-series. Many images are of the
               | world, where there is gravity so you might see
               | preponderance of blobs at the bottom, or the repetitive
               | types like people, animals, faces, eyes. Wildly abstract
               | images still have some continuity, pixels in a
               | neighborhood are likely to be similar.
               | 
               | Time series _in general_ have none of this kind of
               | structure that 's strictly necessary. I'm sure that many
               | real-world sensors typically have some gaussian
               | distribution aspects + noise and/or smoothness and
               | locality types of assumptions that are pretty safe, but
               | presumably that simple stuff is exactly what traditional
               | time-series modelling was exploiting.
               | 
               | Maybe the real question is just what kind of time-series
               | are in the training data, and why do we think whatever
               | implicit structure that is there actually generalizes? I
               | mean, you can see how any training that mixes pictures of
               | dogs and cats with picturing of people could maybe
               | improve drawing hair, detecting hair, or let you draw
               | people AND dogs. It's less clear to me how mixing sensor
               | data / financial data / anything else together could be
               | helpful.
        
               | dist-epoch wrote:
               | > It's less clear to me how mixing sensor data /
               | financial data / anything else together could be helpful.
               | 
               | Because many of these have the same underlying causal
               | structures - humans doing things, weather correlations,
               | holidays.
               | 
               | Well studied behavioral stuff like "the stock market
               | takes the stairs up and the elevator down" which is not
               | really captured by "traditional" modelling tools.
               | 
               | I'm sure people will be doing mechanical interpretation
               | on these models to extract what they pattern match for
               | prediction.
        
               | torginus wrote:
               | Personally, coming from an EE background and not finance
               | or statistics, I would go about identifying these
               | patterns with an Signals & Systems toolbox, like systems
               | identification, various matched filters/classifiers.
               | 
               | This might be a totall wrong approach, but I think it
               | might make sense to try to model a matched filter based
               | on previous stock selloff/bullrun trigger events, and
               | then see if the it has any predictive ability, likewise
               | the market reaction seems to be usually some sort of
               | delayed impulse-like activity, with the whales reacting
               | quickly, and then a distribution of less savvy investors
               | following up the signal with various delays.
               | 
               | I'm sure other smarter people have explored this approach
               | much more in depth before me.
        
               | esafak wrote:
               | You're crafting features. The modern approach to ML (deep
               | learning) is to use over-parameterized models and let
               | them learn the features. Perhaps you remember this?
               | https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-
               | netwo...
        
               | srean wrote:
               | Except that their success in the time series domain has
               | been rather lackluster and elusive. It will s one of the
               | few domains where old school models are not only less
               | work to maintain but also more accurate. There are a few
               | exceptions here and there. Every year there are a few
               | neural nets based challengers. You can follow the M
               | series of computations from its start to see this
               | evolution.
        
               | robot-wrangler wrote:
               | Maybe because useful time-series modeling is usually
               | _really_ about causal modeling? My understanding is that
               | mediated causality in particular is still very difficult,
               | where adding extra hops in the middle takes CoT
               | performance from like 90% to 10%.
        
               | srean wrote:
               | Yes causal models are hard.
               | 
               | NNs do ok on those time series problems where it is
               | really about learning a function directly off time. This
               | is nonlinear regression where time is just another input
               | variable.
               | 
               | Cases where one has to adjust for temporaly correlated
               | errors, those seem to be harder for NNs. BTW I am talking
               | about accuracies beyond what a typical RNN variants will
               | achieve, which is pretty respectable. It's the case that
               | more complicated DNNs don't seem to do much better
               | inspite of their significant model complexity.
        
               | orangemaen wrote:
               | LightGBM won M5 and it wasn't even a competition.
        
               | srean wrote:
               | The task was slightly different and favored GBMs. Note
               | they aren't NNs whose underwhelming performance was what
               | my comment was about.
               | 
               | The M series of competitions change the tasks every year
               | to explore what models perform best under different
               | scenarios. As I mentioned, neural network based models
               | win here and there, but very spotty performance over all.
        
               | robot-wrangler wrote:
               | > Because many of these have the same underlying causal
               | structures - humans doing things, weather correlations,
               | holidays.
               | 
               | Or, you know, maybe they aren't. Thermometers and photon
               | counts are related to weather sometimes, but not
               | holidays. Holidays are related to traffic sensors and to
               | markets, but not Geiger counters.
               | 
               | > Well studied behavioral stuff like "the stock market
               | takes the stairs up and the elevator down" which is not
               | really captured by "traditional" modelling tools.
               | 
               | Prices are the opposite, up like a shot during shocks,
               | falling slowly like a feather. So that particular pattern
               | seems like a great example of over-fitting danger and why
               | you wouldn't expect mixing series of different types to
               | be work very well.
        
               | dist-epoch wrote:
               | Electricity demand is influenced very strongly by
               | holidays, strongly by weather and from weak to strong by
               | geopolitics (depending on location).
               | 
               | The model will have a library of patterns, and will be
               | able to pattern match subtle ones to deduce "this time
               | series has the kind of micro-patterns which appear in
               | strongly weather influenced time-series", and use this to
               | activate the weather pattern cluster.
               | 
               | To use your example, when served thermometer data, the
               | model notices that the holiday pattern cluster doesn't
               | activate/match at all, and will ignore it.
               | 
               | And then it makes sense to train it on the widest
               | possible time series, so it can build a vast library of
               | patterns and find correlations of activation between
               | them.
        
               | energy123 wrote:
               | Sometimes you want inductive bias. No universally true
               | claim can be made like this.
        
           | graemep wrote:
           | Do these models predict on just a single time series then?
           | 
           | it is far more useful for predictions to look for
           | correlations between time series. This is far more complex
           | than looking for correlations in general because most time
           | series trend up or down and therefore correlate.
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | What makes these models different from models used for e.g.
           | audio?
           | 
           | Or other low-dimensional time domain signals?
        
             | carschno wrote:
             | You could abstract speech or other audio as a series of
             | sounds, where time is indeed a factor. Speech, however, has
             | patterns that are more similar to written language than to
             | seasonal patterns that are typically assumed in time
             | series. While trained on different data, the architecture
             | of TimesFM is actually similar to LLMs. But not identical,
             | as pointed out at https://research.google/blog/a-decoder-
             | only-foundation-model...:
             | 
             | > Firstly, we need a multilayer perceptron block with
             | residual connections to convert a patch of time-series into
             | a token that can be input to the transformer layers along
             | with positional encodings (PE).
             | 
             | > [...]
             | 
             | > Secondly, at the other end, an output token from the
             | stacked transformer can be used to predict a longer length
             | of subsequent time-points than the input patch length,
             | i.e., the output patch length can be larger than the input
             | patch length.
        
               | amelius wrote:
               | If "seasonal patterns" is the thing that differentiates
               | between these two data sources, then perhaps time series
               | models should be called seasonal models?
        
           | jcelerier wrote:
           | > They cannot predict wars in the Middle East influencing
           | inflation unless there is a seasonal pattern(s).
           | 
           | well...
        
             | guntars wrote:
             | The Middle East war season is upon us once again
        
               | Forgeties79 wrote:
               | Born too soon to deploy to the Middle East.
               | 
               | Born too late to deploy to the Middle East.
               | 
               | Born just in time to deploy to the Middle East.
        
             | morkalork wrote:
             | Next you'll suggest something looney like a correlation
             | with the 11-year solar cycle!
             | 
             | (for those who are lost:
             | https://x.com/onionweigher/status/1936630237208469898)
        
           | a-dub wrote:
           | ar(k) stuff, sure. that's old news. i would expect the
           | newfangled stuff to be good at 0-shot learning of pre-event
           | signatures spread across multiple series, at a minimum.
        
         | benob wrote:
         | I would say:
         | 
         | - decomposition: discover a more general form of Fourrier
         | transform to untangle the underlying factors
         | 
         | - memorization: some patterns are recurrent in many domains
         | such as power low
         | 
         | - multitask: exploit cross-domain connections such as weather
         | vs electricity
        
         | lovelearning wrote:
         | My understanding is that the synthetic training data helps
         | capture abstract time-series patterns that are common in all
         | domains.
         | 
         | As they say in appendix 8:
         | 
         | > We create the synthetic data to reflect common time-series
         | patterns using traditional statistical models. We start with
         | four simple times series patterns:
         | 
         | > * Piece-wise linear trends (I), where the number of the
         | piece-wise linear components is randomly chosen between 2 and
         | 8.
         | 
         | > * ARMA(p, q) (II), where 1 <= p, q <= 8 and the corresponding
         | coefficients are generated from either a multivariate Gaussian
         | or a uniform, then normalized.
         | 
         | > * Seasonal patterns. In particular we create the sine (III)
         | and the cosine (IV) waves of different random periods between 4
         | and max context length / 2 time-points and time delays.
         | 
         | If there were no such underlying patterns in the class of all
         | time-series data, then even the idea of traditional time-series
         | models would be fundamentally misplaced.
         | 
         | And since this is a transformer model, it also looks for
         | patterns in the problem-specific input data at inference time,
         | just like how the input context to an LLM influences its
         | output's relevance.
        
         | eru wrote:
         | > How can the same model predict egg prices in Italy, and
         | global inflation in a reliable way?
         | 
         | How can the same lossy compression algorithm (eg JPG) compress
         | pictures of everything in a reliable way?
        
           | cenamus wrote:
           | It can't compress pictures of everything in a reliable way.
           | 
           | Text and anything with lots of high frequency components
           | looks terrible
        
             | at_compile_time wrote:
             | Reliably terrible.
        
             | eru wrote:
             | It still doesn't pretty well on text. And we have newer
             | formats and ideas that would also deal with that. (To be
             | really dead simple: have a minimal container format that
             | decides between png or jpg, use png for text.)
             | 
             | However: white noise is where it really struggles. But real
             | pictures of the real world don't look like white noise.
             | Even though in some sense white noise is the most common
             | type of picture a priori.
             | 
             | Similar for real world time series: reality mostly doesn't
             | look like white noise.
        
               | FartyMcFarter wrote:
               | White noise is random, so it's incompressible by
               | definition. By JPG or by any other method no matter how
               | clever.
        
               | eru wrote:
               | I have a very peculiar coin. With 1% probability it turns
               | up heads and with 99% probability it turns up tails.
               | 
               | A string of flips is random, but it's very compressible.
               | 
               | In any case, my point was that reality ain't uniformly
               | random. And not only that: pretty much anything you can
               | point your camera at shares enough similarity in their
               | distribution that we pretty much have universal
               | compression algorithms for real world data.
        
               | hamdingers wrote:
               | What you're saying is only true for lossless compression,
               | if you're fine discarding data you can compress anything.
               | Try it yourself:                   magick -size 512x512
               | xc:gray +noise Random noise.png         magick noise.png
               | -interlace Plane -quality 75 compressed_noise.jpg
               | 
               | Result is ~380k smaller and doesn't look much different
               | at 100%.
        
         | annie511266728 wrote:
         | It's not really predicting "egg prices" or "inflation" -- it's
         | mostly fitting patterns that happen to show up in those series.
         | 
         | The problem isn't domain generalization, it's that we keep
         | pretending these models have any notion of what the data means.
         | 
         | People ask how one model can understand everything, but that
         | assumes there's any understanding involved at all.
         | 
         | At some point you have to ask: how much of "forecasting" is
         | actually anything more than curve fitting with better
         | marketing?
        
           | fjdjshsh wrote:
           | "curve-fitting" has a long history (centuries old) and could
           | be regarded more as a numerical method issue.
           | 
           | Rigorous understanding of what is over fitting, techniques to
           | avoid it and select the right complexity of the model, etc,
           | are much newer. This is a statistical issue.
           | 
           | My point is that forecasting isn't curve fitting, even
           | thought curve fitting is one element of it.
        
         | JackeJR wrote:
         | Actually it can. See
         | https://youtu.be/FUQwijSDzg8?si=LWd5gVNYRd3HH9rJ
         | 
         | Or just search for the James-Stein paradox.
        
         | thesz wrote:
         | > How can the same model predict egg prices in Italy, and
         | global inflation in a reliable way?
         | 
         | For one, there's Benford's law:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
         | 
         | So, predict sign (branch predictors in modern CPUs also use
         | neural networks of sorts), exponent (most probably it changes
         | slowly) and then predict mantissa using Benford's law.
        
         | samuelknight wrote:
         | I think that a model designed to ignore semantic chatter like
         | financial news and deeply inspect the raw data is a very
         | powerful perspective.
        
         | ludicrousdispla wrote:
         | It's best to think of it as a giant tree, from which you can
         | pick cherries.
        
         | strongpigeon wrote:
         | When I worked on Google Ads, we used time series forecasting to
         | compute the odds of an ad campaign reaching its goal (and to
         | tell users how likely they were to hit them).
         | 
         | A ton of (unsophisticated) advertisers would just draw a line
         | from zero to the number they are at today and project that line
         | to the end of the month to forecast the amount of
         | conversions/spend they were going to hit. This of course
         | doesn't take into account various seasonalities (day-of-week,
         | time-of-year, etc.) and gives you a pretty poor forecast.
         | Compared to those, time-series forecasting is much more
         | accurate.
         | 
         | Is it perfectly accurate? No, that's impossible. But when you
         | can train a model on all advertising campaigns, you can give
         | good 95% confidence intervals.
        
       | wiradikusuma wrote:
       | Also: https://github.com/Nixtla/nixtla and
       | https://facebook.github.io/prophet/
        
         | mijailt wrote:
         | And https://github.com/amazon-science/chronos-forecasting
        
       | ra wrote:
       | This has been around a few months now, has anyone built anything
       | on it?
        
       | jdthedisciple wrote:
       | Let me be blunt: Shannon would tell us that time forecasting is
       | bullshit:
       | 
       | There is infinitely more entropy in the real world out there than
       | any model can even remotely capture.
       | 
       | The world is not minecraft.
        
         | mikkom wrote:
         | Yeah all weather forecasts are just magic
        
           | eru wrote:
           | And JPG doesn't work either..
        
           | kgwgk wrote:
           | Whether forecasting is simple: it either rains or it doesn't.
           | 50/50 probability!
        
           | tgv wrote:
           | Weather forecasts are notoriously iffy, and accuracy drops
           | with time, but we understand the physics behind it (to a
           | large extent). There's also a lot of fine-grained data
           | available. For some arbitrary time series, there's only one
           | data sequence, and the model is unknown. Extrapolation then
           | becomes a lot more magical.
        
         | FartyMcFarter wrote:
         | > Shannon would tell us that time forecasting is bullshit
         | 
         | If you're trying to forecast random data, then yes, it's
         | bullshit. Otherwise you have a chance.
        
           | GTP wrote:
           | But, if you don't have the information required for a
           | forecast, then the outcome can look random. We know the
           | physics needed to predict the outcome of a dice throw, but,
           | since to predict the outcome you would need a lot of
           | information that you don't have, the output is random to you.
        
         | drzaiusx11 wrote:
         | Time series forecasting has proven useful in a number of
         | different domains from weather to health monitoring. Sure you
         | can easily over fit on the training data, but in general that's
         | a data source/input problem where you need many high quality
         | data sources to find the signal in the noise.
         | 
         | The world is chaotic sure, but there are still truths to be
         | found in noisy time series data; saying that the world is too
         | random to be knowable is a bit dismissive, no?
        
           | jdthedisciple wrote:
           | I agree when it comes to highly niche applications with a
           | generous SNR.
           | 
           | Universal models though?
           | 
           | And I haven't even mentioned the fact that en mass
           | forecasting ITSELF may influence the subject of forecasting.
        
         | bwfan123 wrote:
         | > time forecasting is bullshit
         | 
         | for a model to be useful, it doesnt need to capture the
         | behavior of a system. It only needs to capture signals which
         | can be useful. For example, for a biased coin toss, a model is
         | already useful if it can predict a little better than random.
        
       | dash2 wrote:
       | So the time series are provided with no context? It's just
       | trained on lots of sets of numbers? Then you give it a new set of
       | numbers and it guesses the rest, again with no context?
       | 
       | My guess as to how this would work: the machine will first guess
       | from the data alone if this is one of the categories it has
       | already seen/inferred (share prices, google trend cat searches
       | etc.) Then it'll output a plausible completion for the category.
       | 
       | That doesn't seem as if it will work well for any categories
       | outside the training data. I would rather just use either a
       | simple model (ARIMA or whatever) or a theoretically-informed
       | model. But what do I know.
        
         | Tarq0n wrote:
         | If it works for predicting the next token in a very long stream
         | of tokens, why not. The question is what architecture and
         | training regimen it needs to generalize.
        
       | raghavMultilipi wrote:
       | This has been around a few months now, has anyone built anything
       | on it?
        
         | magimas wrote:
         | we did some internal tests. The quality isn't bad, it works
         | quite well. But it's essentially on the same level of an ARIMA
         | model trained on the data just much bigger and slower.
         | 
         | So in my opinion it currently falls into a kind of void. If
         | your use case is worth predicting and you put a data scientist
         | on it, you're better off just training cheaper ARIMA models.
        
           | clarionbell wrote:
           | That is disappointing. One would say that with all the budget
           | and compute, Google would be able to create something that
           | beats methods from 70s. Maybe we are hitting some hard
           | limits.
           | 
           | Maybe it would be better to train an LLM with various tuning
           | methodologies and make a dedicated ARIMA agent. You throw in
           | data, some metadata and requested window of forecast. Out
           | comes parameters for "optimal" conventional model.
        
             | magimas wrote:
             | I think this could be an interesting read for you, I read
             | it last week and it kind of argues the same points:
             | https://shakoist.substack.com/p/against-time-series-
             | foundati...
        
               | SpaceManNabs wrote:
               | thanks for sharing.
               | 
               | i met an associate working for a particular VC and they
               | were really into time series foundational models. I
               | argued the most of the "Why real forecasting problems
               | break the whole frame" as to why they were wasting their
               | time at that time.
               | 
               | she was totally convinced i was wrong because she was
               | discussing investing with some top and well respected
               | researchers that were really pushing this and wanted to
               | make a startup around it.
               | 
               | i was and am still confused as at all the wishful
               | thinking. then again, sometimes the best time to sell an
               | idea is right before you think it is possible.
        
       | emsign wrote:
       | Can this finally break the stock markets?
        
         | GTP wrote:
         | The safe bet is no. Based on other comments, this would depend
         | a lot on the specific trends you're trying to predict. But it
         | wouldn't work for everything in the stock market.
        
       | kuu wrote:
       | It would be nice to add (2024) to the title, this is not news
       | (see: https://research.google/blog/a-decoder-only-foundation-
       | model...)
        
         | mrklol wrote:
         | Not directly 2024, there was a big update end 2025
        
       | croemer wrote:
       | (2024)
        
       | pplonski86 wrote:
       | Can someone explain ELI5 how it does work? and how many data
       | points it can read?
        
       | konschubert wrote:
       | Let's say I have long time series of past solar irradiation and
       | long time series of past weather forecasts. Can this model make
       | use of weather forecasts for time X in the _future_ to predict
       | electricity prices in the future?
       | 
       | That is, can it use one time series at time X to predict another
       | time series at time X?
       | 
       | Or is this strictly about finding patterns WITHIN a time series.
        
         | etrautmann wrote:
         | The paper suggests it's for forecasting. How this doesn't just
         | represent the relatively small number of training samples isn't
         | obvious to me. If most of the time series for training go up
         | and to the right then I assume that's what the model will
         | (generally) do, but who knows.
        
       | htrp wrote:
       | isn't this basically prophet?
        
         | staticautomatic wrote:
         | No. Prophet is based on curve-fitting.
        
       | mikert89 wrote:
       | I'm willing to bet an intelligent LLM with a dataset and a pandas
       | stats package could outperform this model by running its own
       | experiments and making predictions
        
         | doruk101 wrote:
         | Instead of willing to bet, you can do it yourself and prove it.
         | It is not like there is a ceiling for doing what you are
         | proposing. I am willing to bet that you are wrong.
        
       | aris0 wrote:
       | Has anyone gotten this to run on MLX yet?
        
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