Hi Xintong, Sean and Chris, Thanks for driving the initiative. Very exciting to bring AI Agent to Flink to empower the streaming use cases.
+1 to the FLIP. Thanks, Hao On Wed, May 21, 2025 at 7:35 AM Nishita Pattanayak < nishita.pattana...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Sean, Chris and Xintong. This seems to be a very exciting sub-project. > +1 for "flink-agents" sub-project. > > I was going through the FLIP , and had some questions regarding the same: > 1. How would the external model calls (e.g., OpenAI or internal LLMs) > integrated into Flink tasks without introducing backpressure or latency > issues? > In my experience, calling an external LLM has the following > risks: Latency-sensitive (LLM inference can take hundreds of milliseconds > to seconds), Flaky (network issues, rate limits) as well as it > is Non-deterministic (with timeouts, retries, etc.). It would be great to > work/brainstorm on how we solve these issues. > 2. In traditional agent workflows, user feedback often plays a key role in > validating and improving agent outputs. In a continuous, long-running > Flink-based agent system, where interactions might not be user-facing or > synchronous, how do we incorporate human-in-the-loop feedback or > correctness signals to validate and iteratively improve agent behavior? > > This is a really exciting direction for the Flink ecosystem. The idea of > building long-running, context-aware agents natively on Flink feels like a > natural evolution of stream processing. I'd love to see this mature and > would be excited to contribute in any way I can to help productionize and > validate this in real-world use cases. > > On Wed, May 21, 2025 at 8:52 AM Xintong Song <tonysong...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > Hi devs, > > > > Sean, Chris and I would like to start a discussion on FLIP-531 [1], about > > introducing a new sub-project, Flink Agents. > > > > With the rise of agentic AI, we have identified great new opportunities > for > > Flink, particularly in the system-triggered agent scenarios. We believe > the > > future of AI agent applications is industrialized, where agents will not > > only be triggered by users, but increasingly by systems as well. Flink's > > event capabilities in real-time distributed event processing, state > > management and exact-once consistency fault tolerance make it well-suited > > as a framework for building such system-triggered agents. Furthermore, > > system-triggered agents are often tightly coupled with data processing. > > Flink's outstanding data processing capabilities allows seamless > > integration between data and agentic processing. These capabilities > > differentiate Flink from other agent frameworks with unique advantages in > > the context of system-triggered agents. > > > > We propose this effort as a sub-project of Apache Flink, with a separate > > code repository and lightweight developing process, for rapid iteration > > during the early stage. > > > > Please note that this FLIP is focused on the high-level plans, including > > motivation, positioning, goals, roadmap, and operating model of the > > project. Detailed technical design is out of the scope and will be > > discussed during the rapid prototyping and iterations. > > > > For more details, please check the FLIP [1]. Looking forward to your > > feedback. > > > > Best, > > > > Xintong > > > > > > [1] > > > > > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-531%3A+Initiate+Flink+Agents+as+a+new+Sub-Peoject > > >
