In Episode 170 of the weekly AIAW Podcast, we sit down with Jim Dowling, CEO of Hopsworks, co-inventor of the open-source featurestore.org, and author of the upcoming O’Reilly book Building Machine Learning Systems with a Feature Store. Often called “Mr. Feature Store,” Jim joins us for a deep and timely conversation on how modern AI systems are evolving—from traditional batch pipelines to real-time, context-aware, and increasingly agentic architectures. We explore how feature stores like Hopsworks are becoming the memory and context engines of AI agents, enabling low-latency, high-impact decision-making. Jim shares insights on LLMs, function calling, vector search, and the role of feature stores in scaling responsible, reproducible, and sovereign AI systems. A must-listen for anyone building the future of applied AI.
