A few weeks ago Max from Nixtla reached out to me to do a hackathon in SF at their place. Knowing how fast Nixtla ships and that they work at the edge of innovation when it comes to time series, I promptly accepted the challenge.
Not only that but that same night after dinner I started playing with Nixtla’s TimeGPT as I got so excited about what I was reading. It was like when I learned about OpenAI for text, Stability for images, and Runway for videos, but this time it was Nixtla for time. And I learned about it before anyone else. I was excited.
But what is TimeGPT? And why did they build it?
TimeGPT is the first generative AI model for temporal data. It allows organizations and individuals to obtain accurate predictions in seconds using 3 lines of code. It leverages the power of large pre-trained transformers without prior ML expertise or training.
However, it can be fine-tuned using proprietary data to further improve accuracy.
They built it because they understand that forecasting helps individuals and organizations plan for what's ahead, enabling them to make informed decisions and allocate resources effectively. But not all of these have a specialized team of ML/AI engineers to tap into, and so for the ones that don’t, they have TimeGPT.
This essentially democratizes access to state-of-the-art predictive insights by eliminating the need for a dedicated team of machine learning engineers. They also built it because they can and have the best team that lives at the intersection of time series and AI.
Why did we incorporate it in the OpenBB Terminal?
The OpenBB Terminal is an open-source investment research platform. We provide access to data coming from nearly 100 different data sources, in over 500 different commands. Most of these command outputs are financial time series, so being able to easily forecast financial time series is important to our users.
All of the commands in our ML/AI Toolkit menu relied on someone having knowledge and experience in ML/AI to understand how to select a model, fine-tune hyperparameters for training, selecting a cross-validation method to avoid overfitting, evaluating the model, and more. But a command that relies on very little to no user input to forecast a financial time series? Almost seems too good to be true, but it’s here.
The command $ forecast/timegpt is now available in the new OpenBB Terminal v3.2.1, which you can download for free here.
How can I use TimeGPT from OpenBB Terminal?
With the community routines announcement (which you can find here) we have now created a community routine that you can run directly from your terminal to make your life easier.
Try:
exe https://my.openbb.co/u/didier/routine/timegpt --input stocks,AAPL
or
exe https://my.openbb.co/u/didier/routine/timegpt --input crypto,BTC
In the example above as you can see the community routine, found here, leverages custom inputs that you can fully customize at the time of running the routine.
Here’s another example (found on our community routines leaderboard) that leverages multiple financial time series to predict the stock price of my soccer ( cries in British English ) team - Benfica - such as Benfica historical price, CPI of Portugal, SPY ETF and Euribor Short-Term Rates.
You get the idea, you can add anything to the mix and TimeGPT will understand what data is most relevant to you. This is where it becomes impressive: You can out-of-the-box easily predict any stock/crypto/economy/... price in a matter of seconds.
More importantly, with OpenBB Hub, you can take the routine and adapt it to your needs.
So what happened at the Nixtla event?
At the event, I demoed how I was able to run easily TimeGPT from a community routine, as seen in the video above. But more importantly, you can understand more about the TimeGPT model since Nixtla’s team introduced it and even did a live coding session with it. Furthermore, there are other speakers (such as Jorge from MindsDB and Jonathan from H2O) that are starting to leverage TimeGPT and they show how you can do it from their platforms/products which is really fascinating given how recent this model is.
Below you can see the video of the event.
Extra
Finally, during this presentation, I shared for the first time, a video about the OpenBB Terminal Pro.
This was not part of the presentation until 2 hours before the event. José, one of our engineers, came to visit in the Bay Area and I challenged him to incorporate Nixtla’s TimeGPT into the OpenBB Terminal Pro. He did it in under 2 hours which not only shows his skillset but also the amazing work Nixtla’s team has done in having an API so straightforward to use.
This is a picture of José and I a few minutes before the event started making sure that the demo would work as intended.
Also wanted to thank Rita, our Marketing Manager, who also came to visit the Bay Area and took pictures at the event.
PS: The OpenBB Terminal Pro is our first commercial product aimed at teams of quants and analysts. If you want to learn more, you can reach out at hello@openbb.finance.