Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Cola2 vs Kronos
Kronos scores 55.2 (C) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Cola2 F
Best for Researchers working on latent or diffusion language models who want a checkpoint to study
No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.
Watch for
No licence stated for the weights
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 25
- Risk, 50 against 40
- Agent interface, 60 against 20
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.
Agent interface Kronos +40
Cola2 20
Chat template 20, A chat template in tokenizer_config.json (4,116 characters), which came with the Qwen3 tokenizer. Tool-calling format 0, none. Trained tool calling 0, not trained for tool calling. Structured output 0, Nothing about JSON or schema-constrained output. Reasoning control 0, no reasoning mode. Context 0, no context length is stated. 20 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 20.
Kronos 60
Read for a forecasting model, the tool-calling, trained tool calling and structured-output lines stand for what it takes and returns. The card documents the DataFrame and timestamps it takes and the DataFrame it returns, and the publisher's KronosPredictor builds and parses them (25). It was trained on six K-line fields with calendar fields, one series per forecast (10). Output is a typed DataFrame indexed by the requested timestamps, the mean of the sampled paths (15). The input format is given only as code (10). Reasoning control and context score 0, with no reasoning and a 512-bar context (2,048 for Kronos-mini).
Reach Kronos +30
Cola2 25
Memory 15, the only build is the F32 safetensors set, 35.07 GB, and 35.07 GB × 1.2 = 42.1 GB, within 64 GB. Loaded as BF16, as the card's example does, it needs about half, but the line reads the file size. Runtimes 0, none of the six runs it in a released version. Builds 0, one set of weights and no quantised build. Terms 0, no licence for the weights. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it, and nothing names an API that serves it. 15 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 25.
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 Kronos +10
Cola2 40
File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, the files sit in the ByteDance-Seed organisation, which the ByteDance-Seed GitHub repository for the model links to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results. Agent guidance 5, General cautions in the GitHub model card: not instruction-tuned or safety-aligned, not for use as an assistant, for facts or advice, or for high-impact decisions about people. Licence risk 0, With no licence for the weights there is nothing to hold ByteDance to. Security programme 5, the GitHub repository's SECURITY.md sends reports to ByteDance's security centre and says how they're assessed (5). 15 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 0 + 5 = 40.
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 | Cola2 | Kronos | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 25 | 55 | Kronos +30 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 40 | 50 | Kronos +10 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 20 | 60 | Kronos +40 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 58 | 61 | Kronos +3 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | F 33.9/100 | C 55.2/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cola2 | Kronos |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | ByteDance (Seed) | 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 | None stated for the weights (the code is 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
Cola2
A research release, and an honest one: ByteDance Seed says it's a base model with an unconverged latent stage, scoring below Llama-3-8B on its own table. It's here for people studying continuous-latent generation. Agents can't use it as a model: 32-token completions, no chat or tools, the repository's own code to load it, and no licence on the weights.
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
Cola2
- Don't plan to use this as your model. It completes short prompts and wasn't tuned to follow instructions
- Don't use it commercially on the strength of this listing. The weights have no stated licence
- If you study it, read modeling_cola2.py first: trust_remote_code runs it
- Pin Transformers below 5, as the card requires
- Pass a seeded torch.Generator to generate(). Output varies between runs even with greedy decoding
- Check the download with
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS
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, Cola2 or Kronos?
Kronos scores 55.2 (C) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), and leads in every scored category.
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/cola2-vs-kronos.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/cola2.json·/api/v1/tools/kronos.json - From a terminal
anchor compare cola2 kronos(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "cola2", "b": "kronos"}at/mcp, no key