We're excited to welcome Snowflake, one of our Gold sponsors, who will be taking the stage to talk about Evolving AI Functions: From Unstructured Data to Agentic Intelligence.
AI Functions bring generative AI directly into SQL, enabling scalable semantic processing of unstructured and multimodal enterprise data. But making these functions truly useful requires solving a deeper research problem: how do we continuously improve their quality, cost, and reliability as models, workloads, and user needs evolve? In this talk, Darek will share research from Snowflake on evaluation and benchmarking, as well as automated function evolution, model routing and cascades, and agentic optimization.
The talk will be presented by @dk21, Staff Research Scientist at Snowflake, working on LLM and multimodal applications. Previously, he worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at Weights & Biases and led the intelligent automation program at P&G. Darek is an author of the first Polish language models and a quadruple Kaggle Grandmaster.
A rare chance to hear how one of the industry's leading data platforms is pushing AI Functions toward real agentic intelligence.
Darek Kłeczek retweeted
Great morning session at the VLDB NOVAS workshop! The big takeaway for me was AvalancheBench from @dk21 and the team at Snowflake — Coding Agents perform better with access to AI Functions! 🔥
And then guess what’s powering a lot of the AI operator optimizations, especially AI Filter, Classify, and Semantic Joins… 🥁… Embeddings!
Can’t wait for the Vector Databae workshop on Friday! I am still very bullish on Named Vectors in Weaviate. Single vector embedings for clustering and semantic cardinality estimation, late interaction for Search!! 🧬
Replying to @jedmaczan
it was too contextual, a fun reference to something we talked a bit earlier, unexpected and something an intelligent person could say, not ai slop machine...
Darek Kłeczek retweeted
First they came for the model builders...
I feel we're getting a glimpse of a future where AI is only provided to a privileged few, and that's not a future I want to live in.
Darek Kłeczek retweeted
As believers of open research, we are disappointed to see Anthropic silently degrading Fable 5 for AI development
"Any topic related to building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design... may have limited effectiveness through Claude via methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning."
Not only do they get to decide what you use LLMs for in research, but this also enables them to silently intervene in your research without you knowing.
This sets a dangerous precedent. If a model refuses openly, users can understand the boundary. If a model falls back to another model, users can still evaluate the difference. But if a model silently modifies or weakens its own answers while still pretending to help, researchers lose the ability to know whether a failed result came from their own idea, their implementation, or an invisible intervention by the model provider.
That is not safety. Safety policies should be transparent, auditable, and user-visible.
On top of that, the people most harmed by this are not the largest labs with massive teams and proprietary infrastructure. It is the independent researchers, academic groups, startups, and open-source builders who rely on public tools to compete, innovate, and pioneer AI for everyone else.
Replying to @kagglingdieter
Just let it dream skok.ai/post/2026-02-21-arti…
How do you explain AI to a class of 8-9 year olds? I wrote about my approach in the blog post. skok.ai/post/2026-03-22-teac…














