What I really want to know is - how do LLMs understand time series at all? Admittedly, even the best LLMs are not fantastic at analyzing time series and tabular data, but they also don’t completely suck at it. Why is that? They seem better at it that my intuition tells me they should be.

In my opinion we need a multi-modal model that is great at both tabular datasets and text analysis. Most analytical work in economics, policy, public health, medicine etc requires a combination of crosschecking between both. Current gen LLMs are not good enough at generating novel insights by looking at tables and text at the same time. I also haven’t have found any data on this so please serve it to be on a plate if I’m wrong.