AI & Data Streaming | Field CTO @confluentinc
Berlin, Germany
Joined May 2009
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- Following1.8K
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Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h…
ALT Margaret Hamilton is reclined inside a NASA spacecraft module, surrounded by control panels and switches.
Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
After 15 years of incredibly hard work, we’re partnering with Uber in a transaction valuing Delivery Hero at €13bn! 🚀
Very proud of what the team has built, and excited for the future.
Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
Mythos appears to be the first class of models trained at scale on Blackwells. Then will be Vera Rubins. Pre-training isn't saturated. RL works. And there is *so much* computing coming online soon.
Buckle your chin strips. It's going to be fucking wild.
Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
Many of the coding wrapper companies have recently changed their monetization to move almost exclusively to usage based.
It’s a necessary step for these companies to be GM+ but it will also accelerate the economic incentive for the underlying Foundational Models to “move up the stack” as well. Otherwise, the FMs risk being disintermediated by agents/tool calls.
Based on the recent valuations of the FMs, it’s unlikely that they can afford to let this happen.
Next few quarters will be really interesting.
💡 Real-time AI agents are only as intelligent as the data they process. I joined the "Life Is But A Stream" podcast with Joseph Morais (@thedatagiant) to talk about how real-time data streaming powers agentic AI and intelligent copilots.
📺YouTube: bit.ly/4jTSTGj
🎧Apple: bit.ly/43fUT4A
🎙️Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0Ac…
Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
💡 Real-time AI agents are no longer just an idea...they’re here.
Tune into the latest Life Is But A Stream episode with Joseph Morais (@thedatagiant) and Airy's Steffen Hoellinger as they dive into how real-time data streaming powers agentic AI and intelligent copilots.
📺 Watch it on YouTube: cnfl.io/459HVYp
🎧Listen Here: cnfl.io/42oI5JH
Summary of my recent #FlinkForward talk "Building #Copilots with #FlinkSQL, LLMs & Vector DBs":
🤖 AI Assistants & self-serve AI/BI for streaming & batch data
🧠 AI-powered schema intelligence
🔄 Natural Language to generate Flink SQL jobs
⚙️ Continuous monitoring for agentic AI
That's why you should ♥️ Logs.
𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐋𝐨𝐠
An idea on how to drastically 𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 in distributed apps.
A fun way to look at this is similar to the idea of Turning the Database Inside Out - like Turning the Microservice Inside Out.
The core idea is: Applications coordinate with many systems (DBs, queues, locks, schedulers, ...) which are all logs underneath. But each log independently maintains its ground truth. We lack common order and conditions.
By letting all those logs build on top of a common log, we can make a lot of distributed systems problems in apps and microservices virtually disappear.
But how is this practically usable, given that our DBs and queues aren't built like this? How do we strike a sweet-spot balance between this model with its great resilience and consistency, and maintaining healthy decoupling and separation of concerns?
We wrote about that design pattern, how it inspired our work on @restatedev, and how you can adopt this for your architecture.
👇
Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐋𝐨𝐠
An idea on how to drastically 𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 in distributed apps.
A fun way to look at this is similar to the idea of Turning the Database Inside Out - like Turning the Microservice Inside Out.
The core idea is: Applications coordinate with many systems (DBs, queues, locks, schedulers, ...) which are all logs underneath. But each log independently maintains its ground truth. We lack common order and conditions.
By letting all those logs build on top of a common log, we can make a lot of distributed systems problems in apps and microservices virtually disappear.
But how is this practically usable, given that our DBs and queues aren't built like this? How do we strike a sweet-spot balance between this model with its great resilience and consistency, and maintaining healthy decoupling and separation of concerns?
We wrote about that design pattern, how it inspired our work on @restatedev, and how you can adopt this for your architecture.
👇
Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
The major areas of AI innovation automate white-collar work. Reviewing the BLS’ data on employment for white collar work, I aggregated the data to these categories.
It’s striking that most of them already have a significant number of AI startups pursuing their ambitions to change workflows.
Software engineers were the first to benefit with Copilot. Today, there’s a panoply of different kinds of AI software for developers, including test generation, code refactoring, code generation, & security analysis.
Within education, The promise of computer adaptive testing and an individualized tutor and the style of Alexander the Great & Aristotle is possible.,
Automated document ingestion & reconciliation for closing books is changing accounting. AI powered financial due diligence rips through public filings, private placement memoranda, & compliance automation.
Legaltech has surged automating demand letters for personal injury, writing briefs for attorneys, & chomping away paralegal work.
We could keep iterating through the list. But if a founder wanted a list of jobs to automate, the BLS’ white collar jobs boards is a wonderful place to start. AI will change these workflows & capture a meaningful fraction of the labor spend.
It’s a roadmap for the White Collar Revolution.
tomtunguz.com/the-white-coll…
🚀 Excited to speak at #FlinkForward this week about 🛠️ "Building #Copilots with #Flink SQL, LLMs & Vector Databases"
🔗 #AI Assistants connecting models with enterprise data
🎯 Boosting Flink SQL accuracy with Schema Intelligence
⚙️ Optimizing cost, performance & data security
Thrilled to support this fantastic initiative by @andreasklinger, @hrklmann, @SimonSchaefer, @vojtech & others! A common European entity is a great first step toward further harmonization on taxes, labor laws, and more within the EU.
Europe, it's time for action! 🇪🇺
Join our petition for an EU-Inc:
A pan-European startup entity
Goal:
- fix investments
- fix europe-wide employment
- fix stock options
- unite the European startup ecosystems
We got 6 weeks to make this real!
Sign here: eu-inc.org
Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
Europe – we need your help.
Please sign this petition to create a pan-european legal entity and promote it as much as you can: eu-inc.org
We got RIGHT NOW a once in a generation chance to improve Europe for startups. 🔥
We got 6 weeks until the new comission sets their work agenda for the years to come. Uniting the European startup ecosystems needs to be part of this agenda!
The solution is known, it's just one out of hundreds for politicians. It's our job as industry to show how important it is.
First co-signatories are people like @patrickc, @nzennstrom, @martinmignot, @MattClifford, @Taavet, Eléonore Crespo, @jobvo, @roxannevarza and many many more coming in the next weeks. Hopefully including you! ✌️
How you can help:
- Sign this
- Get your friends, your team, your investors, your portfolio to sign
- Share this in your whatsapp, slack and discord groups
- Get this in front of press, newsletters, and influencers
eu-inc.org/
For Europe, for the next generations to come: Let's make Europe the best place for innovators.
Uniting as one ecosystem is the first step - a pan-european ecosystem is the key here. Let's go!
Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
Interesting work on reviving RNNs. arxiv.org/abs/2410.01201 -- in general the fact that there are many recent architectures coming from different directions that roughly match Transformers is proof that architectures aren't fundamentally important in the curve-fitting paradigm (aka deep learning)
Curve-fitting is about embedding a dataset on a curve. The critical factor is the dataset, not the specific hard-coded bells and whistles that constrain the curve's shape. As long as your curve is sufficiently expressive all architectures will converge to the same performance in the large-data regime.
Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
As an AI researcher and entrepreneur, I'm glad Governor @GavinNewsom vetoed SB 1047.
I've been saying for years: Regulate AI applications, don't regulate abstract AI models.
The same way we regulate specific types of illegal content and don't make the internet slower instead.
Steffen Hoellinger retweeted
Unbelievably grateful to @GavinNewsom for doing the right thing for California and vetoing SB 1047. This is the path to sensible AI policy and maintaining California's global leadership in AI.
Thank you to every who worked tirelessly to shed light on the perils of SB 1047. Many have worked tirelessly on this for months. We're all deeply indebted to you.
Going forward, @dawnsongtweets has articulated well the right path to evidence based policy. Please join me in supporting her and her co-authors to keep California the leader in AI, and effective AI policy.
understanding-ai-safety.org/
