Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Arete-27B vs Kronos
Kronos and Arete-27B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 55.2 (C) and 55.1 (C). Arete-27B leads on risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 4969 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Best for Agents that want Qwen3.8-27B's coding and tool use without its handling of politically sensitive topics, on a 24 GB card or a 128 GB machine
Ahead on
- Risk, 55 against 50
Watch for
No quantised build from Nous Research, so the GGUF route depends on a third party
Kronos C
Best for Agents that need a quick local forecast or synthetic sample of a candlestick series on modest hardware, for research or as one input among others.
Ahead on
- Reach, 55 against 50
Watch for
Runs only through the publisher's own PyTorch code from GitHub, in no named runtime and with no quantised build
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Reach Kronos +5
Arete-27B 50
Memory 10, the only build from Nous Research is the 54.7 GB BF16 release, which needs about 66 GB and fits the reference machine. Runtimes 15, vLLM, SGLang and Transformers run the base's architecture from those files, and llama.cpp isn't credited because Nous Research publishes no GGUF. Builds 0, no quantised build of its own. Terms 15, Apache 2.0. Download 10, not gated. Hosted 0, no provider. 10 + 15 + 0 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 50.
Kronos 55
Memory 30, the publisher's Kronos-mini with its tokeniser is 0.03 GB and even Kronos-base is 0.43 GB in FP32. Runtimes 0, it runs only through the publisher's own PyTorch package from GitHub, and none of the six named runtimes supports it. Builds 0, FP32 safetensors only. Terms 15, MIT with nothing added. Download 10, nothing is gated. Hosted 0, no inference provider or publisher API serves it (provider mapping still empty on 4 November).
Risk Arete-27B +5
Arete-27B 55
File safety 25, safetensors only and no remote code. Provenance 15, Nous Research's own organisation, linked from its blog, with a hash on every file. Safety evaluation 0 and agent guidance 0, nothing published on either. Licence risk 15, plain Apache 2.0. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw found. 25 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 15 + 0 = 55.
Kronos 50
File safety 15, safetensors only, but the only documented loading path is the publisher's Python package in place of a runtime. Provenance 15, the files are in the NeoQuasar account the publisher's README links, with SHA-256 hashes. Safety evaluation 0, none published. Agent guidance 5, the README's general cautions that the fine-tuning pipeline isn't a production trading system. Licence risk 15, plain MIT; the broken licence link is charged to file health. Security programme 0, no reporting route found.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Arete-27B | Kronos | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 50 | 55 | Kronos +5 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 55 | 50 | Arete-27B +5 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 60 | 60 | even |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 63 | 61 | Arete-27B +2 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 55.1/100 | C 55.2/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Arete-27B | Kronos |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | Nous Research | Yu Shi (shiyu-coder, NeoQuasar), Tsinghua University |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-11-06 | 2026-04-13 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Popularity | none | 43k stars |
Verdicts
Arete-27B
Qwen3.8-27B with its answers on politically sensitive topics retrained, four days old when read. The training data is published, which is rare. Nous Research ships BF16 only, so a small machine runs it from bartowski's GGUF, and the card documents none of the tool or thinking controls it inherits.
Kronos
Forecasts the next price bars from a history of up to 512 candlestick bars. Every size fits in under 0.5 GB and runs on a CPU, but only through the publisher's own Python package. Nobody has benchmarked it independently, its quickstart data was deleted from the repository, and the publisher hasn't replied since November 2025.
Before you call either
Arete-27B
- Start it with
llama-server -hf bartowski/NousResearch_Arete-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, a third party's conversion, or serve the BF16 files with vLLM - Use the base's parsers in vLLM,
--reasoning-parser qwen3 --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, and check tool calls first, since the template differs slightly from Qwen3.8-27B's - Thinking switches with
enable_thinkingin the template. The card's own evaluation ran with it off - Expect answers on politically sensitive topics to differ from Qwen3.8-27B's. That is what the fine-tune is for
- Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
Kronos
- Clone https://github.com/shiyu-coder/Kronos and
pip install -r requirements.txt, then loadKronos.from_pretrained("NeoQuasar/Kronos-small")andKronosTokenizer.from_pretrained("NeoQuasar/Kronos-Tokenizer-base")and wrap them in KronosPredictor - Pair Kronos-mini with Kronos-Tokenizer-2k and Kronos-small or Kronos-base with Kronos-Tokenizer-base, the cards' pairing
- The examples read examples/data/XSHG_5min_600977.csv, which no longer exists; point them at tests/data/regression_input.csv, 2,500 five-minute bars
- Keep the lookback at or under max_context, 512 bars, and pass the future timestamps you want as y_timestamp, since the calendar fields come from them
- Raise sample_count for a steadier forecast, but expect only the mean back; call the lower-level auto_regressive_inference yourself if you need the paths
- Treat forecasts as model output to check, not signals; the README says its own backtest pipeline isn't a production trading system
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Arete-27B or Kronos?
Kronos and Arete-27B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 55.2 (C) and 55.1 (C). Arete-27B leads on risk.
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/arete-27b-vs-kronos.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/arete-27b.json·/api/v1/tools/kronos.json - From a terminal
anchor compare arete-27b kronos(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "arete-27b", "b": "kronos"}at/mcp, no key