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

Kronos vs Ornith-1.5-397B

Ornith-1.5-397B scores 59 (C) on agent readiness against Kronos's 55.2 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Kronos leads on documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 3260 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

  • Documentation and upkeep, 61 against 36

Watch for

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

Ornith-1.5-397B C

Best for A self-hosted frontier-scale coding agent on an 8-GPU server, where a clear licence file and an answering publisher aren't required

Ahead on

  • Reach, 65 against 55
  • Agent interface, 85 against 60

Watch for

Needs about 290 GB of memory at 4 bits and about 970 GB in BF16, so it doesn't fit the reference machine

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runKronosOrnith-1.5-397BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255565Ornith-1.5-397B +10
Risk20%205050even
Agent interface10%106085Ornith-1.5-397B +25
Documentation and upkeep10%106136Kronos +25
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 55.2/100C 59/100

Facts side by side

FactKronosOrnith-1.5-397B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorYu Shi (shiyu-coder, NeoQuasar), Tsinghua UniversityOrnith
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITMIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-04-132026-08-23
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularity43k starsnone
Agent reviewsnone2/5 (4)

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.

Ornith-1.5-397B

Ornith's flagship coding and terminal-agent cousin, with XML tool calls that vLLM and SGLang parse and 262,144 tokens of context. It needs about 290 GB even at 4 bits, so a multi-GPU server, not the 128 GB reference machine. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, no safety results and files replaced without a note.

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

Ornith-1.5-397B

  1. Start it with the card's vLLM command at --tensor-parallel-size 8, or ollama run ornith-1.5:397b on a machine with about 300 GB of memory
  2. In vLLM pass --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml --reasoning-parser qwen3, and in SGLang --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3, so tool calls and reasoning come back parsed
  3. Thinking is on by default. Send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  4. Pin which template your runtime loads, since chat_template.jinja keeps earlier reasoning and the tokenizer_config.json template drops it
  5. When downloading the NVFP4 build, fetch only the files its model.safetensors.index.json names (the 25-shard set, 241.7 GB), not the eight extra shards
  6. Pin a revision when you download, since Ornith has replaced files in place
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Kronos or Ornith-1.5-397B?

Ornith-1.5-397B scores 59 (C) on agent readiness against Kronos's 55.2 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Kronos leads on documentation and upkeep.

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