Johannes Hoffart
@hoffart.ai
CTO, AI at SAP - #foundationmodel #linkedbusinessdata #knowledgegraph #nlp #ai - www.hoffart.ai
SAP-RPT-1 is here: The foundation model for tabular data.
Predict payment delays, ticket severity, churn and more with high accuracy and minimal setup.
Try it now:
* Playground: rpt.cloud.sap
* Get open source: huggingface.co/SAP/sap-rpt-...
* Read the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2506.10707
Predict payment delays, ticket severity, churn and more with high accuracy and minimal setup.
Try it now:
* Playground: rpt.cloud.sap
* Get open source: huggingface.co/SAP/sap-rpt-...
* Read the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2506.10707
SAP-RPT-1 Playground | Try with your own test data or SAP-provided example datasets
SAP-RPT-1 is a relational pretrained foundation model that delivers accurate predictive insights from structured business data. It uses in-context learning, allowing users to provide example records directly in API calls, to generate instant, reliable predictions without any model training.
rpt.cloud.sap
November 5, 2025 at 8:39 AM
SAP-RPT-1 is here: The foundation model for tabular data.
Predict payment delays, ticket severity, churn and more with high accuracy and minimal setup.
Try it now:
* Playground: rpt.cloud.sap
* Get open source: huggingface.co/SAP/sap-rpt-...
* Read the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2506.10707
Predict payment delays, ticket severity, churn and more with high accuracy and minimal setup.
Try it now:
* Playground: rpt.cloud.sap
* Get open source: huggingface.co/SAP/sap-rpt-...
* Read the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2506.10707
A new player enters the arena of Foundation Models on Tabular Data: www.limix.ai - novel methods for pre-training and data generation that look highly relevant. Their evaluation on selected datasets is showing strong performance. Exciting times, looking forward to further in depth comparisons!
LimiX
www.limix.ai
September 15, 2025 at 11:28 AM
A new player enters the arena of Foundation Models on Tabular Data: www.limix.ai - novel methods for pre-training and data generation that look highly relevant. Their evaluation on selected datasets is showing strong performance. Exciting times, looking forward to further in depth comparisons!
At #VLDB2025 London I joined a panel on Neural Relational Data. My Take: LLMs solve some data management tasks, but the next wave is Foundation Models on Relational Data and Semantically Linked Tables. More on this and further trends in #AI and #DataManagement - www.hoffart.ai/vldb-2025-ai...
VLDB 2025: AI Meets Enterprise Data Management — The Tabular FM Moment – Johannes Hoffart
www.hoffart.ai
September 11, 2025 at 11:55 AM
At #VLDB2025 London I joined a panel on Neural Relational Data. My Take: LLMs solve some data management tasks, but the next wave is Foundation Models on Relational Data and Semantically Linked Tables. More on this and further trends in #AI and #DataManagement - www.hoffart.ai/vldb-2025-ai...
Our team developing Foundation Models on Tables & Linked Business Data is looking for a new Senior Applied Research Scientist! Excited about pushing the frontier in foundation models on tabular data? Want to have business impact and academic visibility?
Look no further: jobs.sap.com/job/Walldorf...
Look no further: jobs.sap.com/job/Walldorf...
Senior/Principal Applied Research Scientist (f/m/d): Foundation Models on Linked Business Data
Senior/Principal Applied Research Scientist (f/m/d): Foundation Models on Linked Business Data
jobs.sap.com
August 1, 2025 at 7:47 AM
Our team developing Foundation Models on Tables & Linked Business Data is looking for a new Senior Applied Research Scientist! Excited about pushing the frontier in foundation models on tabular data? Want to have business impact and academic visibility?
Look no further: jobs.sap.com/job/Walldorf...
Look no further: jobs.sap.com/job/Walldorf...
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
For the past 3 years, I've taught a course on Machine Learning for Climate Change to undergrads. At times, people have asked if the course lectures could be made available online. While I can't offer that, I have decided to start making "5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet" videos. Hope its useful!
5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet
AI is more than just chatbots! Learn about how AI can be used to protect biodiversity, fight climate change, and just better understand our planet through 5-minute explainers covering academic papers ...
www.youtube.com
June 20, 2025 at 1:55 AM
For the past 3 years, I've taught a course on Machine Learning for Climate Change to undergrads. At times, people have asked if the course lectures could be made available online. While I can't offer that, I have decided to start making "5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet" videos. Hope its useful!
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
Can you train a performant language model using only openly licensed text?
We are thrilled to announce the Common Pile v0.1, an 8TB dataset of openly licensed and public domain text. We train 7B models for 1T and 2T tokens and match the performance similar models like LLaMA 1 & 2
We are thrilled to announce the Common Pile v0.1, an 8TB dataset of openly licensed and public domain text. We train 7B models for 1T and 2T tokens and match the performance similar models like LLaMA 1 & 2
June 6, 2025 at 7:19 PM
Can you train a performant language model using only openly licensed text?
We are thrilled to announce the Common Pile v0.1, an 8TB dataset of openly licensed and public domain text. We train 7B models for 1T and 2T tokens and match the performance similar models like LLaMA 1 & 2
We are thrilled to announce the Common Pile v0.1, an 8TB dataset of openly licensed and public domain text. We train 7B models for 1T and 2T tokens and match the performance similar models like LLaMA 1 & 2
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
Here's the full workshop handout plus annotated slides from "Building software on top of Large Language Models", a three hour tutorial I presented yesterday at PyCon US #PyConUS simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/...
Building software on top of Large Language Models
I presented a three hour workshop at PyCon US yesterday titled Building software on top of Large Language Models. The goal of the workshop was to give participants everything they …
simonwillison.net
May 15, 2025 at 12:29 PM
Here's the full workshop handout plus annotated slides from "Building software on top of Large Language Models", a three hour tutorial I presented yesterday at PyCon US #PyConUS simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/...
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
I asked "on the other platform" what were the most important improvements to the original 2017 transformer.
That was quite popular and here is a synthesis of the responses:
That was quite popular and here is a synthesis of the responses:
April 28, 2025 at 6:47 AM
I asked "on the other platform" what were the most important improvements to the original 2017 transformer.
That was quite popular and here is a synthesis of the responses:
That was quite popular and here is a synthesis of the responses:
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
This was helpful.
Also worth noting that Bluesky remains a very fraught place for AI discussions for a variety of reasons, good & bad, but with the impact of keeping a lot of the most relevant AI news, paper discussions & biggest names on X
That might change, but it hasn’t yet. Still posting, tho.
Also worth noting that Bluesky remains a very fraught place for AI discussions for a variety of reasons, good & bad, but with the impact of keeping a lot of the most relevant AI news, paper discussions & biggest names on X
That might change, but it hasn’t yet. Still posting, tho.
I wrote something up for AI people who want to get into bluesky and either couldn't assemble an exciting feed or gave up doomscrolling when their Following feed switched to talking politics 24/7.
The AI Researcher's Guide to a Non-Boring Bluesky Feed | Naomi Saphra
How to migrate to bsky without a boring feed.
nsaphra.net
April 26, 2025 at 2:55 AM
This was helpful.
Also worth noting that Bluesky remains a very fraught place for AI discussions for a variety of reasons, good & bad, but with the impact of keeping a lot of the most relevant AI news, paper discussions & biggest names on X
That might change, but it hasn’t yet. Still posting, tho.
Also worth noting that Bluesky remains a very fraught place for AI discussions for a variety of reasons, good & bad, but with the impact of keeping a lot of the most relevant AI news, paper discussions & biggest names on X
That might change, but it hasn’t yet. Still posting, tho.
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
It's been a couple of years since GPT-4 powered Bing, but with the various Deep Research products and now o3/o4-mini I'm ready to say that AI assisted search-based research actually works now simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/21/...
AI assisted search-based research actually works now
For the past two and a half years the feature I’ve most wanted from LLMs is the ability to take on search-based research tasks on my behalf. We saw the …
simonwillison.net
April 21, 2025 at 2:14 PM
It's been a couple of years since GPT-4 powered Bing, but with the various Deep Research products and now o3/o4-mini I'm ready to say that AI assisted search-based research actually works now simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/21/...
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
I just shared a new article, "The State of Reasoning Models", where I am exploring 12 new research articles on improving the reasoning capabilities of LLMs (all published after the release of DeepSeek R1): magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/state-of-l...
Happy reading!
Happy reading!
The State of LLM Reasoning Models
Part 1: Inference-Time Compute Scaling Methods
magazine.sebastianraschka.com
March 8, 2025 at 2:37 PM
I just shared a new article, "The State of Reasoning Models", where I am exploring 12 new research articles on improving the reasoning capabilities of LLMs (all published after the release of DeepSeek R1): magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/state-of-l...
Happy reading!
Happy reading!
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a "compressed 21st century"
Here: thomwolf.io/blog/scienti...
It's an extension of this interview discussion from the AI summit: youtu.be/AxBd3G0lFLs?...
Here: thomwolf.io/blog/scienti...
It's an extension of this interview discussion from the AI summit: youtu.be/AxBd3G0lFLs?...
March 6, 2025 at 1:03 PM
I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a "compressed 21st century"
Here: thomwolf.io/blog/scienti...
It's an extension of this interview discussion from the AI summit: youtu.be/AxBd3G0lFLs?...
Here: thomwolf.io/blog/scienti...
It's an extension of this interview discussion from the AI summit: youtu.be/AxBd3G0lFLs?...
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
When using LLM-as-a-judge, practitioners often use greedy decoding to get the most likely judgment. But we found that deriving a score from the judgment distribution (like taking the mean) works better!
❌LLM-as-a-judge with greedy decoding
😎Using the distribution of the judge’s labels
❌LLM-as-a-judge with greedy decoding
😎Using the distribution of the judge’s labels
LLM judges have become ubiquitous, but valuable signal is often ignored at inference.
We analyze design decisions for leveraging judgment distributions from LLM-as-a-judge: 🧵
(w/ Michael J.Q. Zhang, @eunsol.bsky.social)
We analyze design decisions for leveraging judgment distributions from LLM-as-a-judge: 🧵
(w/ Michael J.Q. Zhang, @eunsol.bsky.social)
March 6, 2025 at 10:04 PM
When using LLM-as-a-judge, practitioners often use greedy decoding to get the most likely judgment. But we found that deriving a score from the judgment distribution (like taking the mean) works better!
❌LLM-as-a-judge with greedy decoding
😎Using the distribution of the judge’s labels
❌LLM-as-a-judge with greedy decoding
😎Using the distribution of the judge’s labels
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
Discover European cities ✈️ while building your career! Check out the ELLIS PhD/Postdoc Program's 2025 Winter & Summer School Schedule! Dive deep into cutting-edge #AI research, learn from top researchers & connect with peers across Europe. Learn more: bit.ly/42iow66 #PhD #machinelearning
January 13, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Discover European cities ✈️ while building your career! Check out the ELLIS PhD/Postdoc Program's 2025 Winter & Summer School Schedule! Dive deep into cutting-edge #AI research, learn from top researchers & connect with peers across Europe. Learn more: bit.ly/42iow66 #PhD #machinelearning
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
Our first release of 2025: 𝙨𝙢𝙤𝙡𝙖𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀!
💥 Main logic in ~1000 LoC
🧑💻 Agent writes its actions in code! LLMs are much better at writing code than current standard of writing JSON => higher perf
🌍 Any LLM support (h/t LiteLLM)
🛡️ Secure code exec (h/t E2B)
💥 Main logic in ~1000 LoC
🧑💻 Agent writes its actions in code! LLMs are much better at writing code than current standard of writing JSON => higher perf
🌍 Any LLM support (h/t LiteLLM)
🛡️ Secure code exec (h/t E2B)
January 1, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Our first release of 2025: 𝙨𝙢𝙤𝙡𝙖𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀!
💥 Main logic in ~1000 LoC
🧑💻 Agent writes its actions in code! LLMs are much better at writing code than current standard of writing JSON => higher perf
🌍 Any LLM support (h/t LiteLLM)
🛡️ Secure code exec (h/t E2B)
💥 Main logic in ~1000 LoC
🧑💻 Agent writes its actions in code! LLMs are much better at writing code than current standard of writing JSON => higher perf
🌍 Any LLM support (h/t LiteLLM)
🛡️ Secure code exec (h/t E2B)
Have a look at our work on foundation models on tabular data, published today at #TRL @ #NeurIPS2024:
📜 PORTAL, an open weight and code foundation model trained on tabular data, and
📜 SALT, a real business data set containing millions of sales orders across multiple tables.
Further details 👇
📜 PORTAL, an open weight and code foundation model trained on tabular data, and
📜 SALT, a real business data set containing millions of sales orders across multiple tables.
Further details 👇
December 14, 2024 at 5:56 PM
Have a look at our work on foundation models on tabular data, published today at #TRL @ #NeurIPS2024:
📜 PORTAL, an open weight and code foundation model trained on tabular data, and
📜 SALT, a real business data set containing millions of sales orders across multiple tables.
Further details 👇
📜 PORTAL, an open weight and code foundation model trained on tabular data, and
📜 SALT, a real business data set containing millions of sales orders across multiple tables.
Further details 👇
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
Wrote up my initial impressions of the new Google Gemini 2.0 Flash model - it's really good, and the streaming mode (where you can stream video and audio to it and get audio streamed right back) is pure science-fiction simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/11/...
Gemini 2.0 Flash: An outstanding multi-modal LLM with a sci-fi streaming mode
Huge announcment from Google this morning: Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era. There’s a ton of stuff in there (including updates on Project Astra and …
simonwillison.net
December 11, 2024 at 8:22 PM
Wrote up my initial impressions of the new Google Gemini 2.0 Flash model - it's really good, and the streaming mode (where you can stream video and audio to it and get audio streamed right back) is pure science-fiction simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/11/...
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
The 3rd Table Representation Learning (TRL) workshop at NeurIPS 2024 is approaching soon ✨
Join us Saturday 14 Dec from 8:30AM for an amazing program and discussions about all things neural models + tabular data (table-representation-learning.github.io ).
Not in Vancouver? Join online neurips.cc 😎
Join us Saturday 14 Dec from 8:30AM for an amazing program and discussions about all things neural models + tabular data (table-representation-learning.github.io ).
Not in Vancouver? Join online neurips.cc 😎
Table Representation Learning Workshop
TRL Workshop ---
table-representation-learning.github.io
December 9, 2024 at 6:18 PM
The 3rd Table Representation Learning (TRL) workshop at NeurIPS 2024 is approaching soon ✨
Join us Saturday 14 Dec from 8:30AM for an amazing program and discussions about all things neural models + tabular data (table-representation-learning.github.io ).
Not in Vancouver? Join online neurips.cc 😎
Join us Saturday 14 Dec from 8:30AM for an amazing program and discussions about all things neural models + tabular data (table-representation-learning.github.io ).
Not in Vancouver? Join online neurips.cc 😎
We are growing the team building the SAP Knowledge Graph and are #hiring AI & Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Knowledge Engineers and Applied Research Scientists in Germany (Berlin, Walldorf) and India (Bangalore): jobs.sap.com/search/?crea...
Let's take GenAI to the next level with #KG!
Let's take GenAI to the next level with #KG!
SAP Knowledge Graph - SAP Jobs
Find SAP Knowledge Graph at SAP
jobs.sap.com
December 4, 2024 at 10:36 AM
We are growing the team building the SAP Knowledge Graph and are #hiring AI & Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Knowledge Engineers and Applied Research Scientists in Germany (Berlin, Walldorf) and India (Bangalore): jobs.sap.com/search/?crea...
Let's take GenAI to the next level with #KG!
Let's take GenAI to the next level with #KG!
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
Tired of saturated benchmarks? Want scope for a significant leap in capabilities?
🔥 Introducing BALROG: a Benchmark for Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games!
BALROG is a challenging benchmark for LLM agentic capabilities, designed to stay relevant for years to come.
1/🧵
🔥 Introducing BALROG: a Benchmark for Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games!
BALROG is a challenging benchmark for LLM agentic capabilities, designed to stay relevant for years to come.
1/🧵
November 21, 2024 at 4:24 PM
Tired of saturated benchmarks? Want scope for a significant leap in capabilities?
🔥 Introducing BALROG: a Benchmark for Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games!
BALROG is a challenging benchmark for LLM agentic capabilities, designed to stay relevant for years to come.
1/🧵
🔥 Introducing BALROG: a Benchmark for Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games!
BALROG is a challenging benchmark for LLM agentic capabilities, designed to stay relevant for years to come.
1/🧵
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
Great blog post from @odihq.bsky.social @esimperl.bsky.social on the current development state of #dataspaces in Europe.
theodi.org/news-and-eve...
theodi.org/news-and-eve...
What are data spaces and what do they do?
Learn more about data spaces: what they are, what they do and what’s next.
theodi.org
November 30, 2024 at 12:29 PM
Great blog post from @odihq.bsky.social @esimperl.bsky.social on the current development state of #dataspaces in Europe.
theodi.org/news-and-eve...
theodi.org/news-and-eve...
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
Let me surface this again now that this place is more lively: Come join us at SAP in the US or Germany for a PhD Summer Internship in 2025 in Foundation Models on Structured Data, Table Representation Learning, LLMs and Knowledge Graphs! #MLInternships
We are looking for PhD summer interns for 2025 in the area of Foundation Models on Structured Data, Table Rep Learning, LLMs and Knowledge Graphs.
If you want to work on groundbreaking research on the richest business data available, please reach out to me or apply here: jobs.sap.com/job/Berlin-P...
If you want to work on groundbreaking research on the richest business data available, please reach out to me or apply here: jobs.sap.com/job/Berlin-P...
PhD Intern (f/m/d) - Business AI Research
PhD Intern (f/m/d) - Business AI Research
jobs.sap.com
November 26, 2024 at 8:51 PM
Let me surface this again now that this place is more lively: Come join us at SAP in the US or Germany for a PhD Summer Internship in 2025 in Foundation Models on Structured Data, Table Representation Learning, LLMs and Knowledge Graphs! #MLInternships
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
November 24, 2024 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Johannes Hoffart
I am chairing the
AI@HPI Conference: Responsible AI
December 3-4 in Potsdam (Berlin metropolitan area)
Discussing AI with regard to bias, elections/society, trustworthiness, copyright, the EU AI Act, and best practices.
Registration:
hpi.de/en/ai-hpi-co...
Please spread the word!
AI@HPI Conference: Responsible AI
December 3-4 in Potsdam (Berlin metropolitan area)
Discussing AI with regard to bias, elections/society, trustworthiness, copyright, the EU AI Act, and best practices.
Registration:
hpi.de/en/ai-hpi-co...
Please spread the word!
November 21, 2024 at 5:36 PM
I am chairing the
AI@HPI Conference: Responsible AI
December 3-4 in Potsdam (Berlin metropolitan area)
Discussing AI with regard to bias, elections/society, trustworthiness, copyright, the EU AI Act, and best practices.
Registration:
hpi.de/en/ai-hpi-co...
Please spread the word!
AI@HPI Conference: Responsible AI
December 3-4 in Potsdam (Berlin metropolitan area)
Discussing AI with regard to bias, elections/society, trustworthiness, copyright, the EU AI Act, and best practices.
Registration:
hpi.de/en/ai-hpi-co...
Please spread the word!