Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Kronos vs LFM3-1.7B

LFM3-1.7B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Kronos's 55.2 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Kronos leads on risk. 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

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

  • Risk, 50 against 40

Watch for

Runs only through the publisher's own PyTorch code from GitHub, in no named runtime and with no quantised build

LFM3-1.7B C

Best for Agents on a laptop, phone or small server that need tool calling and a long context from a model under 2 GB at 4 bits

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 55
  • Agent interface, 100 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 67 against 61

Watch for

vLLM and SGLang have no released support, though the card lists both

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 LFM3-1.7B +40

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).

LFM3-1.7B 100

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (12,129 characters), with roles, tools, deferred tools, tool results and the thinking switch. Tool-calling format 25, the card and Liquid's tool-use page document tools passed through tools= in apply_chat_template, calls returned as XML and results sent back as tool messages. Trained tool calling 20, the template loops over every entry in an assistant turn's tool_calls, so several calls fit in one turn, and the card says the model was trained on tool calls and agentic traces and with reinforcement learning inside agent harnesses. Structured output 15, Liquid's API guide documents response_format with a JSON Schema, with lfm3-1.7b as the model in its examples, and says the schema is checked before generation starts. Reasoning control 10, the card documents enable_thinking=False in the chat template to turn reasoning off per request, with reasoning on by default inside think tags, and preserve_thinking for earlier turns. Context 10, 256K tokens per the card, which says the mid-training stage extended the context window to 256K, and max_position_embeddings 262144 in config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 15 + 10 + 10 = 100.

Reach LFM3-1.7B +30

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).

LFM3-1.7B 85

Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB, and 1.10 GB × 1.2 = 1.3 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 15, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture (src/models/lfm3.cpp at b12242), Ollama's library has an lfm3 entry, and LM Studio's catalogue runs the architecture (its liquid/lfm3-vl-2b entry; lmstudio-community publishes a GGUF of this model). Builds 15, Liquid's GGUF repository holds Q4_0, Q4_K_M, Q8_0, F16 and BF16 files, and Liquid publishes 4-bit and 8-bit MLX builds and an ONNX repository, all in the LiquidAI organisation. Terms 10, the LFM Open License v1.0, a custom licence that lets anyone use it commercially for free below a threshold of $10M annual revenue. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for the model and its GGUF, MLX and ONNX repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, Liquid's own API lists lfm3-1.7b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 85.

Risk Kronos +10

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.

LFM3-1.7B 40

File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, files in the LiquidAI organisation, which Liquid's docs page for the model and its blog post link to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card or in Liquid's blog post for the LFM3 family, neither of which mentions safety testing. Agent guidance 0, Nothing on prompt injection, an instruction hierarchy, what refusals cover or safeguards to add. Licence risk 10, 15 less 5 for the $10M annual revenue threshold on commercial use. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw found. 15 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 40.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-1.7B +6

Kronos 61

Model card 11, intended use, architecture, parameters and context are there, limitations, languages and a cut-off aren't. Training data 20, the paper lists every exchange with asset and observation counts, the filtering and a June 2024 end. Last change 5, the reference code on 13 April 2026 (still the newest commit on 4 November, 205 days) and the Hub repositories on 9 September 2025. Responsiveness 20, the publisher answered 10 of 18 Hugging Face discussions (recounted by script on 4 November), though none since 24 November 2025, and the seven opened since April 2026 have no reply from it. Version policy 5, a first release. File health 0, the cards point to example data the repository has deleted and to licence and requirements links on a branch that doesn't exist.

LFM3-1.7B 67

Model card 17, Intended use (local agents, tool calling, structured outputs, fine-tuning), a limitation (not recommended for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning), architecture (24 layers: 13 gated short convolutions, 5 sliding-window and 6 global attention), parameters (1.73B), context (256K) and 16 languages. Training data 5, A general description: 22T tokens of pre-training in two stages with the kinds of data added since LFM2, 1.75T tokens of supervised fine-tuning, then mixed reinforcement learning, distillation from six specialist teachers and agentic reinforcement learning. Last change 20, the last commit, on 9 November 2026, added the OpenVINO checkpoint to the card's inference table, a day before this check. Responsiveness 10, Of the 22 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 October to 8 November 2026), 7 have a reply from a LiquidAI member, which is some. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the lfm3 architecture, the 262,144-token context and the thinking switch. 17 + 5 + 20 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 67.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runKronosLFM3-1.7BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255585LFM3-1.7B +30
Risk20%205040Kronos +10
Agent interface10%1060100LFM3-1.7B +40
Documentation and upkeep10%106167LFM3-1.7B +6
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 55.2/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactKronosLFM3-1.7B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorYu Shi (shiyu-coder, NeoQuasar), Tsinghua UniversityLiquid AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-04-132026-11-09
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Popularity43k starsnone

Verdicts

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.

LFM3-1.7B

A 1.73B model that fits an 8 GB machine with room to spare, with a documented tool-call format, deferred tools, a thinking switch and a 256K context. It runs today in llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio only, loads in Transformers through repository code, and has no safety results, security contact or data sources.

Before you call either

Kronos

  1. Clone https://github.com/shiyu-coder/Kronos and pip install -r requirements.txt, then load Kronos.from_pretrained("NeoQuasar/Kronos-small") and KronosTokenizer.from_pretrained("NeoQuasar/Kronos-Tokenizer-base") and wrap them in KronosPredictor
  2. Pair Kronos-mini with Kronos-Tokenizer-2k and Kronos-small or Kronos-base with Kronos-Tokenizer-base, the cards' pairing
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. Treat forecasts as model output to check, not signals; the README says its own backtest pipeline isn't a production trading system

LFM3-1.7B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3
  2. Use temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition penalty 1.1 for chat, tools and agents, per the card
  3. Pass enable_thinking=False for direct answers, and expect it to reason anyway on hard tasks
  4. For a large tool catalogue mark tools defer_loading and give it a search tool
  5. Don't plan on vLLM or SGLang until a release carries LFM3
  6. Liquid doesn't recommend it for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Kronos or LFM3-1.7B?

LFM3-1.7B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Kronos's 55.2 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Kronos leads on risk.

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