Joining Hopsworks: of course I had to get in on the AI/ML hype! Here's why!

I wanted to write a short article to share with you some of my thoughts on why I joined Hopsworks and what my and our plans are for the next couple of months and years - aside from utter world domination, of course :) … Here goes.

2023 has been an interesting year for me. Exiting from Neo4j after a decade was of course a little bit of an earthquake for me - mostly because all of a sudden I was no longer part of the graph tribe as much any more. Even though I wanted the exit and totally agreed to the process, it was still more impactful than I had guessed. Then came a number of interesting but turbulent months where I worked for a number of smaller startups, among which the amazing team at Hackolade - but in all honesty, just could not find my bearings. So when that quest ended, it felt like I really needed to take a step back and think about what I wanted to do.

That process, and a whole bunch of coincidences that I never could have planned, lead me to join the best Machine Learning platform company I could find :) … Here’s what made me do that.

1. The Hopsworks market seems incredibly interesting to me. Yes, since the ChatGPT hype every man and their dog seems to want to do something with AI - but I am convinced that this is not the next blockchain hype. There is much more to it - and ML and AI systems are here to stay.
   
   
2. The reason why they are here to stay isstay, is that there is true value in it. Yes, we have had great data analytics for years. Yes we have had statistics for years. But to be able to use the best of that in a system that brings in the best of these techniques in operational pipelines that are actually going to accurately predict the future - it’s pretty much a game changer. If you have seen how ChatGPT is able to predict the words of sentences etc… then you understand how good these ML-based predictions can really be. The results are just very impressive.
   
   
3. The number of business use-cases for that type of predictive power is just without limit. As always, I expect the adoption to be gradual and value-based: the people that get the most value from these platforms will likely start using it first. But, not unsimilar to what I experienced at Neo4j, there is no limit to the potential of Hopsworks. The current customers already prove it.
   
   
4. Hopsworks actually has some amazing product tech that makes it really well poised for success. At the heart of that technology is a feature store (think of it as the beating heart of the ML system: this is where the online and offline data of your ML system gets stored and managed) that, just because it is so damn fast, allows for a completely different way of doing machine learning. RonDB, the key-value store that Mikael Ronström originally conceived for MySQL as NDB, has found another great use case for it - and we are going to use it to the max.

And then, there is one final thing that made it easy to join a new adventure: the team. Hopsworks is about 35 people strong these days, and they have been nothing but superbly welcoming to me. It’s been a month of fantastic energy, lots of laughter, great discussions, and a feeling of collective purpose that I am savoring by the minute. I am extremely grateful to be able to start this journey - and will share updates along the way.

If you want to know more about Hopsworks, please go to hopsworks.ai, or hit me up so that we can schedule a chat. I have also included a short intro video at the bottom of this post.

All the best

Rik

PS: Find a lot of our videos on our youtube page!