Why You Should Care About TimeGPT

Image by the author.

“The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before and will be again.” Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear

In 1735, John Harrison won a strange price — £20,000 to the first man who developed a marine chronometer with which longitude could be calculated within half a degree at the end of a voyage to the West Indies.

Up until that point, there have been tons of unfortunate disasters at sea caused by poor navigation, primarily a result of the lack of proper time measurement. Time is essential to all human endeavors, even if it sounds like this:

“…we believe in AI’s transformative potential for temporal tabular data.”

that sounds like a rather specific and strange mission, doesn’t it? And yet, those specific missions are sometimes the best.

The company behind this statement just announced a fantastic new generic machine learning model called timeGPT — the ChatGPT of time series data — kind of—more like v1, but still better than 0.1.

And yet, the responses to the announcement are mixed, hostile, and dismissive.