[HN Gopher] AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
___________________________________________________________________
AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 386 points
Date : 2024-07-10 13:26 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| https://archive.ph/33O61
| _flux wrote:
| Nice to see AMD finally doing something about competing in the
| compute market (LLM being the hottest thing at the moment)!
|
| Though apparently MI300X is a fine product as well. But it still
| needs code.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If they spent the 665M on improving ROCm instead they'd get a
| hell lot more return on it.
| SSLy wrote:
| My cursory understanding is that Silo is a developer of LLMs that
| run on top of compute platforms. Isn't the problem with no one
| using AMD's accelerators the fact that their programming
| environment is sub-par compared to CUDA, or even Apple's?
| csomar wrote:
| Sure, buying this company for 600m will fix everything.
| sqeaky wrote:
| That is the most sarcastic thing I have read in weeks.
|
| But isn't getting a software stack the exact kind of thing
| they need? Is there no overlap in the skills at the purchased
| company and the skills needed to make the AMD software stack
| not suck?
| eysgshsvsvsv wrote:
| You all live in a simple world where complex systems are
| fixed in simple statements like software stack is all they
| need.
| sqeaky wrote:
| Why the personal attack?
|
| I said that I interpreted the previous comment as
| sarcastic so I could be called out if it wasn't. The
| author hasn't yet disagreed. And I think sarcasm is
| warranted in a space that has witnessed so many bad
| acquisitions.
|
| On software at AMD; if my world is so simple, please
| explain where I am wrong. I never said this was a simple
| solution, I implied there was some overlap needed skills.
|
| ROCm sucks, it has licensing and apparently use issues.
| It has had performance issues, and that is getting
| better. It isn't in a lot of the places it needs to be
| where it could be considered a default choice.
|
| Apparently, Silo uses AMD stuff to do ML work.
| Apparently, they have domain experts in this space. It
| seems likely that getting input from such people could
| positively influence the ML and hardware.
|
| Of course there will be complexity in this process. This
| is a 600 million dollar deal involving thousands of
| people (not just Silo employee, but AMD people,
| regulators, stakeholders, etc). I don't think anyone is
| implying this is simple.
|
| I only wanted to say, "This isn't obviously dumb".
| mindcrime wrote:
| I'm curious about these "licensing issues" you speak of.
| From what I've seen, the vast majority of the ROCm
| components are MIT licensed, with a few bits of Apache
| license and NCSA Open Source License mixed in. Could you
| possibly elaborate on that?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Sure, there is _some_ overlap. Is that overlap worth 665M?
| rvnx wrote:
| Yes, it brought instantly (at least partially) +12B USD
| on the valuation of AMD. This shows to investors that AMD
| is still in the race.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Yeah I saw the stock market uptick, but that is a
| kneejerk reaction by the public markets. It's not as if
| the public market participants have had ample time to
| evaluate the merits of the acquisition, and even then, if
| they are right or not.
| szundi wrote:
| Anyway, it seems market thinks this is a 20x value
| acquisition.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| You shouldn't attribute that on the acquisition. The
| stock went 3.8% up today but also 4% up on monday, 4.8%
| up last Friday 4.2% up last Tuesday etc.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| That assumes that the reason AMD's software stack sucks is
| because of skill, not company culture, management or other
| reasons that won't change with this acquisition.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| If it's a culture problem and the C-suite is aware of it,
| then one reason to buy a company with a working software
| stack is to percolate their culture into your company so
| you can be successful.
| szundi wrote:
| Hopefully the ceo of the acquired company gets a director
| role in AMD then at least, not subordinated a supposedly
| subpar cultured director already in AMD
| aardvarkr wrote:
| I have a friend working there and it's a bunch of old
| curmudgeons stuck in their way. Good luck changing
| culture with a single acquisition
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The company I used to work for is doing this to the
| engineering org in my current employer. It requires the
| leadership from the old company to be embedded in very
| senior positions, and it requires buy-in from the
| existing C-suite. There's a lot of backroom politics to
| change culture along with a bunch of work to prove
| yourselves to people who aren't involved in the backroom.
| There have been a bunch of points at which I didn't think
| it would continue but so far the original team has been
| pretty successful at rising.
|
| Think of it as a reverse McDonnell-Douglas.
| imtringued wrote:
| I also have this impression. The software problems that
| are plaguing AMD are in the "less than $10 million"
| range, if they hired the right people to work on the most
| severe bugs in their GPU drivers and let them do their
| job.
| anonym29 wrote:
| "fix"? What is there to fix? AMD has been simultaneously
| fighting Intel and Nvidia, two MUCH larger companies, and
| it's been winning the fight against Intel for close to a
| decade now.
|
| It's certainly not Lisa Su's fault that the clowns over at
| Intel got stuck on variations of 14nm (with clever marketing
| names like 14nm+++++) for nearly a decade, but credit
| certainly is hers for introducing Zen and putting AMD back on
| top of the x86 market.
|
| With the new x870(e) motherboards and Granite Ridge chips
| right around the corner, effortlessly destroying the
| pyrotechnic processing units known as Raptor Lake, it's
| honestly a miracle to me that Intel's stock price is still as
| high as it is.
|
| Guess wall street still loves those billions of forcefully
| confiscated taxpayer dollars being doled out by Uncle Sam to
| a graying dinosaur like Intel who couldn't even compete
| without those handouts... the quality of their marketplace
| offerings certainly isn't what's keeping that valuation up!
| philistine wrote:
| I'm also bullish on Intel, but clearly not as much as you.
| Intel is transitioning right now. x86 is never going to
| reclaim the crown of most important architecture, so Intel
| is trying its best to become a foundry for all the fabless
| customers out there. It's going to take a long while, but
| right now they're the best company to compete with TSMC in
| ten years. If Apple uses their foundries next decade,
| you'll know Intel is back on top.
| seabird wrote:
| This site is full of people with the west coast VC-driven-
| tech bizarro world blinders on. If AMD just keeps at what
| they've been doing well (matching or beating Intel
| processors) instead of chasing after the latest buzzword
| grift bubble, they're doomed in the eyes of people with
| that mindset.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| AMD needs to expand the user base of their GPUs away from
| gaming and desktop graphics. Buying an AI company that is
| using their stack for compute is a really good way of
| learning how to do that. It's essentially now an in-house
| team to dogfood all of your brand new products and tell
| your other engineering teams what they're doing wrong.
|
| In my mind it's not about AI per se, but about using the
| hot use case for GPU to drive meaningful change in your
| software stack. There are tons and tons and tons of GPGPU
| users out there who aren't training LLMs but who need a
| high-quality compute stack.
| mandevil wrote:
| I think AMD's concern is that x86 might not be much of a
| market in 10 years. Between Apple, Amazon Graviton, and
| Nvidia Grace Hopper's ARM CPU we are seeing a sustained
| successful attack on x86 the likes of which we haven't
| seen... ever? Sustained and successful non-x86 Desktops,
| servers, and next-gen datacenter platforms, where does
| that leave AMD? (Intel has a little more diversification
| because of it's foundry opportunities, but is in the same
| boat.)
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| > "fix"? What is there to fix? AMD has been simultaneously
| fighting Intel and Nvidia, two MUCH larger companies, and
| it's been winning the fight against Intel for close to a
| decade now.
|
| There's everything to fix. AMD is sitting on a gold mine
| and is squandering massive amounts of money every month
| that they don't just get their shitty software stack in
| order.
|
| AMD could be as rich as NVIDIA. Instead, Lisa Su for some
| insane reason refuses to build even the most mediocre ML-
| capable libraries for their GPUs.
|
| If I could ask anyone in the ML world at the moment what
| the heck they're thinking, it would be her. Nothing makes
| sense about AMDs actions for years on this topic. If I was
| the board, I'd be talking about her exit for wasting such
| an opportunity.
| rdtsc wrote:
| What do you think they should do?
| anewhnaccount2 wrote:
| They successfully trained LLMs on Lumi, which has AMD Instinct
| MI250X GPUs. This perhaps provides a hint about one angle on
| why AMD are interested.
| zacksiri wrote:
| It makes sense then for AMD to buy them out.
|
| If they've trained LLMs with lumi which has a lot of instinct
| GPUs there is a high chance they've had to work through and
| solve a lot of the gaps in software support from AMD.
|
| They may have already figured out a lot of stuff and kept it
| all proprietary and AMD buying them out is a quick way to get
| access to all the solutions.
|
| I suspect AMD is trying to fast track their software stack
| and this acquisition allows them to do just that.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I am curious if the models are any good, though. The
| landscape is so fragmented I never heard of Poro.
| ghnws wrote:
| Poro (reindeer in finnish) is specifically developed to
| be used in Finnish. GPT etc. general models struggle with
| less used languages. Unfortunately this sale likely means
| this development will cease.
| hrududuu wrote:
| Gpt4 or even 3.5 is quite good at Finnish. Was there ever
| a benchmark against closed source models?
| pantalaimon wrote:
| So AMD wants to know how they did it, understand.
| doikor wrote:
| They have been using/building stuff for the LUMI supercomputer
| which has a bit over 12000 MI250X
|
| https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1206/am...
|
| "Silo AI has been a pioneer in scaling large language model
| training on LUMI, Europe's fastest supercomputer powered by
| over 12,000 AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs,"
| btown wrote:
| The underinvestment in, and abandonment of, a project for a
| CUDA compatibility layer
| https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA?tab=readme-ov-file#faq by AMD a
| few months ago hints that they no longer see CUDA compatibility
| as a goal. Perhaps they see Silo as a way to jumpstart bringing
| ROCm to parity with CUDA's toolkit. It's hard to understand if
| there's an underlying strategy to how they'll stay relevant
| from a software perspective when they're abandoning projects
| like this.
|
| Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39344815
| seunosewa wrote:
| That's an unfortunate choice. AMD has excelled in making
| compatible hardware. Not so much software success, if any.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It makes no business sense for them to try to get CUDA
| compatibility. That would just cement CUDA as the de facto
| standard, at which point they are locked in to playing catch
| up forever as nVidia intentionally adds features to break
| compatibility.
|
| Much more sensible to work on getting rock solid support for
| their own standards into all the major ML
| platforms/libraries.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It depends what means by "business sense". Compatible
| makers have profited, did profit during PC era. Indeed, one
| of AMD's core businesses is make xx86 compatible CPUs.
|
| Nvidia and standard-maker is limited in what breaking
| changes they introduce - these can harm their customers as
| much as they harm the competition. Intel failed to force
| all their changes on AMD as the xxx86 market expanded
| (notably, the current iteration of CPUs standards was set
| by AMD after Intel was unable to sell their completely new
| standard).
|
| Still, I'd acknowledge that "business sense" today follows
| the approach of only aiming for markets the company can
| completely control and by that measure, CUDA compatibility
| isn't desirable.
| mandevil wrote:
| I think the key is that CUDA is much more like the
| Microsoft Windows software part of the duopoly than the
| Intel x86 hardware part of the old Wintel duopoly. At
| best back in the glory days of that era, you could have
| weird hackish things like WINE ... until Microsoft's
| business model changed and started being interested in
| supporting virtualization to build up Azure.
|
| The key is that while there were many clones of x86,
| there never really was an attempt at a company built
| around "run MS Windows programs natively" because
| maintaining software compatability is an order of
| magnitude harder than doing it for hardware.
| slashdave wrote:
| They don't need parity. They just need ROCm (or OpenCL) to be
| a reasonably viable alternative.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Maybe they can use LLMs now to program their platform for them?
| </snark or not really>
| pjietr wrote:
| Silo.ai is mostly a consulting house for various proof-of-
| concept type of projects with the LLM product being only the
| recent addition
| antupis wrote:
| Silo mainly does consulting and those models were kinda done on
| side. But great for founders and truly weird acquisition for
| AMD.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| Looks like a consulting company[1] at first glance. Also, empty
| HuggingFace account[2].
|
| [1]: https://www.silo.ai/ [2]: https://huggingface.co/SiloAI
| anewhnaccount2 wrote:
| The models are here: https://huggingface.co/LumiOpen
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Who is downvoting this? You are correct. Silo.AI _is_ a
| consulting company with an LLM side hustle. This acquisition is
| weird.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Looks like they have expertise in using AMD gpus to train
| LLMs and will be tasked to catch up to cuda
| high_na_euv wrote:
| What are they going to give AMD that they are priced this high?
| thenaturalist wrote:
| Expert talent and prob some in house tech.
|
| Mainly talent I guess which they can put to accelerating Triton
| development, their alternative to CUDA.
| duxup wrote:
| Does the desirable talent in this case have equity / future
| vesting equity that is a part of the price?
|
| I just wonder as many decades ago I was a part of a company
| who wanted to get into a market, they bought a little start
| up, and over the course of a year everyone quit, and the
| project eventually folded entirely ;) It was sorta hilarious,
| but also bizarre that the acquiring company didn't think of
| that.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| I mean buying a "private AI lab" doesn't sound to me like
| they have the purchase price worth in IP which is so
| desirable nobody else has unlocked it and it lends itself
| particularly well to being integrated with AMD tech?
|
| Let's see if more details come to light, but a good part of
| that price is spent for sure on people.
|
| It'd be hilarious indeed if they wouldn't be able to or
| haven't properly incentivized them to retain them.
| stanleykm wrote:
| Did you mean ROCm? afaik Triton is a python framework that
| sits on top of CUDA and ROCm.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| Huge congratulations to the founders and what a nice mark for the
| European (and Nordirc) startup community.
|
| It's gonna be quite interesting to see if this works out
| strategically.
|
| I guess the bet is an in-house army of PhDs vs. having a CUDA -
| which you don't as a second mover here - and assuming PhDs
| tightly coupled with the hardware can outperform an open
| framework/ push Triton to parity to CUDA over time.
| sva_ wrote:
| Congrats to the founders indeed, but
|
| > what a nice mark for the European (and Nordirc) startup
| community.
|
| Not sure if it is a great win for the EU at large if their AI
| startups get bought up by American companies though, to be
| fair.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| The economy and startup world isn't a zero sum game.
|
| Ultimately the AI play* is open source for the foreseeable
| future, even more so for AMD if they want to sell their
| chips.
|
| And if Silo AI's people accelerate competition in the AI HW
| space by accelerating Triton development/ raising the
| industry's competitive edge against Nvidia, we all benefit
| from stronger competition.
|
| And in most other European startup hot spots, senior staff/
| founders with previous exits reinvested their earnings into
| the domestic startup scene through founding again or becoming
| Business Angels or going VC.
|
| I see this as a huge net win.
|
| * EDIT: For integrating with compute, I guess.
| 627467 wrote:
| Actually, it is zero sum. there's finite resources, human
| talent, and centers for decision making. yeah, European
| startup gets American money today, and American decision
| making center grows larger. whether the money paid into
| Europeans now is used to prop up new generation of startups
| - in any meaningful way - will remain to be seen. most
| likely: these senior staff/founders will probably allocate
| their cash where it is more efficient and I doubt it will
| be (meaningfully) in europe
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| Europe's tech ecosystem will still benefit a lot
| regardless. Zero-sum thinking is not good- it causes
| economic regression and poverty in the long run.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| The fact you're posting this comment in a thread of a
| press release of the acquisition of a European startup
| entity is in itself a counterfactual, wouldn't you agree?
|
| One of the Cofounders of Silo is ex-Nokia...
|
| Should tell you everything about zero-sum games.
|
| Sure, the US is the dominant financial and technological
| economy on the planet and that will not change for the
| foreseeable future.
|
| But implying a globalized, technology enabled economy
| will behave in a zero-sum fashion is just plain wrong.
|
| The US is where it is today because post WWII it
| geniously recognized the value of free and global trade
| and invested heavily in its Navy to enable and protect
| said trade.
|
| Instead of making things on your own in the US, you could
| sit in New York and invest globally - the value of your
| investment and access to its dividends guaranteed by the
| power of the US military.
|
| Relative value against the status quo is created every
| day everywhere by millions of smart people.
|
| What Europe - and Finland in that example - has is a
| century old tradition and established infrastructure for
| high education.
|
| That investment will continue to pay off for the
| foreseeable future.
| singhrac wrote:
| I'm not sure we agree on what zero sum here means, but
| one direct consequence of having a decent exit here is
| that the investors in Silo will get a capital return they
| can use to raise more funds.
|
| I don't know what the founders of Silo will do, but the
| investors are in the business of investing, and
| incrementally the viability of being an AI VC in this
| area has gone up (depends on the counterfactual but I
| think cash exit is better than some chance of IPO).
| bee_rider wrote:
| Don't European programmers make much less than Americans?
| I wouldn't be surprised if they kept a pretty big
| footprint over there.
|
| Big picture the US unemployment rate is quite a bit lower
| than the EU, so I'm sure any global company is happy to
| draw from the bigger pool.
|
| Finally, benefits can be unbalanced in favor of one
| entity or another without being zero sum. Even if the US
| benefits more from this deal, the purchasing company,
| AMD, still turns sand into extremely valuable
| electronics. That's not a zero-sum activity.
| mgfist wrote:
| You say it's zero-sum then in the next sentence say
| "whether the money paid into Europeans now is used to
| prop up new generation of startups - in any meaningful
| way - will remain to be seen", which surely implies that
| it's not necessarily zero-sum.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> Not sure if it is a great win for the EU at large if their
| AI startups get bought up by American companies though, to be
| fair._
|
| That would be a concern if the plan was to move the entire
| team to the US. But if the Finland based company just becomes
| a part of AMD then I see little downside. Some very competent
| people in Finland now have $665M to fund new startups.
|
| Ultimately I think the most important question is where the
| interesting and high productivity work gets done. That's the
| place that benefits most.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> That would be a concern if the plan was to move the
| entire team to the US. _
|
| The issue is that all that Finnish labor now fuels a US
| tech giant who's profit center is in the US, not in EU,
| therefore mostly boosting the US economy in the process.
|
| Then there's also the trade barriers that come with now
| becoming a US tech company instead of a Finnish one. You
| can't sell to China, and other countries on the US's shit
| list without Uncle Sam's approval.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > US tech giant who's profit center is in the US, not in
| EU, therefore mostly boosting the US economy in the
| process
|
| More of a matter of accounting than reality. For years,
| Apple were deliberately _not_ repatriating their profits
| to avoid tax, keeping them out of the US economy.
| https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/17/it-looks-like-apple-is-
| bring...
|
| The question of where a profit is actually made for a
| multinational company can be very unclear.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> The issue is that all that Finnish labor now fuels a
| US tech giant who's profit center is in the US, not in
| EU, therefore mostly boosting the US economy in the
| process._
|
| No, this is not how it works. Assuming Silo AI continues
| to operate out of Finland, its investments, the
| consumption of its employees and its exports will
| continue to count towards Finland's GDP just like before.
| Any profits go to AMD shareholders all over the world,
| not just in the US. The strategic alignment between Silo
| AI and AMD may well benefit both Finland and the US.
|
| We have a similar debate in the UK regarding DeepMind.
| And yes it's true, if you assume that DeepMind or Silo AI
| would have become world dominating tech behemoths in
| their own right, then it would have been better for
| Britain/Finland if they hadn't been sold.
|
| But it's also possible that the UK and Finish operations
| are ultimately more successful as part of Google/AMD
| because they benefit from strategic opportunities they
| wouldn't otherwise have.
|
| I'm not saying that headquarters don't matter or that
| there are no downsides (e.g wrt corporation tax). What I
| am saying is that it's not automatically a bad thing for
| a country if a company gets sold to a foreign
| corporation.
|
| One thing is for sure. It's far better to have a lot of
| US subsidiaries in the country than watching your
| graduates and startup founders leave for the US.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| they have loyal and stable staff with healthy family lives
| unlike 8 of 10 California companies
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| Employee loyalty isn't a good thing. One of the best things
| about Silicon Valley is that people can swiftly change
| companies when they get higher offers. Non-competes are void
| in California.
|
| There's a reason US salaries for software devs are 2-5x EU
| salaries for similar roles.
| snowpid wrote:
| What if I told you that non - competes aren't a thing in
| Germany. (And a big part in other parts of US)
| storyinmemo wrote:
| Well I'd tell you that they aren't a thing in California.
| talldayo wrote:
| ...as of six months ago.
| Alupis wrote:
| Anyone could ask you to sign a non-compete. But in
| California, they have been legally unenforceable for as
| long as I have been alive.
|
| What was changed is they now cannot make condition of
| employment based on signing this unenforceable contract.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| As someone who has been stuck in Silicon Valley for 20
| years I can say hands down the German and European teams
| I've worked with far outshine the hacker ego Hollywood
| hipster techbros of San Francisco. Yet the latter make
| 2-5x the income.
| rangestransform wrote:
| employee loyalty is a good thing if it's bought and not
| expected
| p_j_w wrote:
| >There's a reason US salaries for software devs are 2-5x EU
| salaries for similar roles.
|
| When you account for medical costs, rent (especially
| compared to the localities in the USA that provide these
| huge salaries), extra vacation time, and for those with
| children, education and child care, this gap narrows
| considerably.
|
| Rent alone... one can find a reasonable spot in Berlin for
| ~$1300/mo. Good luck finding more than a shared box in the
| Tenderloin for that much in the Bay Area.
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| > When you account for medical costs, rent (especially
| compared to the localities in the USA that provide these
| huge salaries), extra vacation time, and for those with
| children, education and child care, this gap narrows
| considerably.
|
| That's what Europeans generally say to justify or cope
| with their low salaries, but it's not true. After
| accounting for all these, an SV, NYC, Seattle, etc.,
| engineer ends up with far more disposable income than
| their EU counterpart.
|
| The US has the highest average disposable income
| worldwide; the rest almost don't come close [1]. That's
| why it has much more entrepreneurial activity.
|
| Yes, the US isn't perfect, but the EU doesn't come close
| to the US in terms of money for highly skilled
| professional workers.
|
| 1- https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-
| household-di...
| p_j_w wrote:
| >After accounting for all these, an SV, NYC, Seattle,
| etc., engineer ends up with far more disposable income
| than their EU counterpart.
|
| I said it narrows the gap, not closes it.
|
| >https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-
| household-di...
|
| Your link is behind a paywall, I can't view that data.
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| Point noted, Wikipedia breaks down the data better - http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c.
| ...
| hi wrote:
| Anyone know a timeline for AMD on MLPerf?
| latchkey wrote:
| It won't be for a while. It really takes someone to focus on
| this and it isn't just AMD. The team at MLPerf will need to
| step in as well and from my discussions with them, they are
| busy enough as it is with their own goals.
|
| My company, Hot Aisle, has a box of mi300x (soon to be +16
| more) that we have dedicated as a free resource to unbiased
| benchmarking. That's instigated articles like the Chips &
| Cheese one and the Nscale Elio post...
|
| https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/06/25/testing-amds-giant-mi3...
|
| https://www.nscale.com/blog/nscale-benchmarks-amd-mi300x-gpu...
| georgehotz wrote:
| AMD is already on MLPerf in the form of the tinybox red :)
| Kelteseth wrote:
| They should have bought tiny for 600 million ;)
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| This and the MI300x makes me hopeful for AMD
| latchkey wrote:
| It really is a fantastic piece of hardware. We just need the
| software to catch up.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Which tbf has been an apt description of AMD GPUs for the
| better part of a decade. Great hardware, god awful software
| and even worse long term software strategy.
|
| It's why the 'fine wine' spin on the long term performance of
| AMD GPUs exists in gaming circles.
| latchkey wrote:
| You're totally right. That said, spending $665m on an AI
| company seems, at first glance, like a step in the right
| direction. I'm sure there are a 1000 ways they could have
| spent that much money, but hey... I do appreciate them at
| least trying to do something to resolve the issue. Another
| way to think of it is that now there is a whole team that
| isn't dedicated to nvidia.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yeah I'm not arguing against this acquisition, just
| commenting on how things have been so far. At this point
| I'm kind of apathetic, it's good if whatever they do
| eventually leads them to fixing their software woes, and
| I'll come back to their stuff then. If not, I'm fine with
| sticking to CUDA for now.
|
| Ultimately they're all GPU programming languages, once
| you're good with one, switching to another one is not
| that hard (as long as the supporting software is good of
| course).
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Imagine AMD simply put that $665M into tooling and driver
| development. The stock probably would have doubled.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| What's the difference to what they did in this acquisition?
|
| Who's gonna improve tooling and develop drivers?
|
| PhD level AI experts such as employed by Silo AI, probably,
| right?
|
| EDIT: For context [0], Nvidia invested billions into CUDA
| development way back when it was unsexy.
|
| Clearly a second mover won't need that much, Nvidia proved the
| market.
|
| But a billion doesn't seem like a large sum for the potential
| upside of AMD catching a significantly larger share of the
| budget going into AI - many times the value of this
| acquisition.
|
| 0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-
| hua...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Perhaps their goal is to develop an LLM and then prompt it to
| fix ROCm.
| duxup wrote:
| I always wonder about these thought experiments. Given a few
| good talented people and good management ... you'd think they'd
| be able to put a team together, but maybe talent in this area
| is few / far between?
|
| To be clear, i'm not disagreeing, I really don't know, but yeah
| $665M, could do a lot with that.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| You are basically paying some premium for the fact that
| someone already did the hiring and built the talent pool and
| a cohesive team. Doing that from scratch is a multi-year
| project, so they basically bought a shortcut.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah I get the general idea that you're paying more for the
| assembled team and software / experience.
|
| It's just always wonky as acquisitions generally don't seem
| to be 100% known quantities / outcomes. People paying big
| premiums for what sometimes turn out to be nothing.
|
| That package of talent and etc is handy, but also seems
| like sometimes it makes it harder to really know what
| you'll get out of it. It's an interesting dynamic.
| speed_spread wrote:
| The org structure and culture dynamics of large companies like
| AMD makes it very difficult to achieve quality results when
| starting from scratch. 665M$ might well have been too much
| money, putting too much pressure for results for anything
| valuable to emerge. A 665M$ acquisition means they know exactly
| what they are getting, and they are getting it _now_.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| also note they paid in cash.. usually a premium in itself.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > Imagine AMD simply put that $665M into tooling and driver
| development
|
| Feels like a company saying they're going to "spend a few weeks
| paying down tech debt", which generally amounts to nothing
| getting done. Progress happens in creative pursuit of another
| goal and with hard constraints, in my experience. You can fix a
| specific piece of tech debt while working on a product feature
| that's adjacent to it, and you can create some great tooling
| and drivers while working on a product that needs them, but
| just setting aside the money for greenfield development
| often/usually ends up with it being set alight. I have worked
| at least one very well-funded place where the lack of product
| focus and thus lack of any constraints has just led to endless
| wheel spinning under the guise of "research".
| daghamm wrote:
| Since FT is paywalled and the press release link from Silo is
| currently pointig to nowhere:
|
| https://www.silo.ai/blog/amd-to-acquire-silo-ai-to-expand-en...
|
| I've no idea what is going on. This is 5 times bigger than their
| combined AI acquisitions in the last 12 months. The only link
| between Silo and AMD is that Silo has been using an AMD
| accelerator cluster for training.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| I honestly don't understand how paywalled links get so much
| traction, most people probably can't even engage with the
| material. Thanks for the direct link to Silo AI's press
| release!
| thenaturalist wrote:
| See @helsinkiandrews comment, he posted the de-paywalled
| link: https://archive.ph/33O61
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Because everyone knows how to use archive.org
| mastax wrote:
| I'd argue that a factor in CUDA's success is their army of in-
| house researchers which use CUDA to do novel things. Sometimes
| those things get turned into products (OptiX) other times they
| are essentially DevRel to show off what the hardware can do and
| documentation for how to do it. Additionally I'm sure they use
| pre-release hardware and software and give feedback about how to
| improve it.
|
| I don't know what AMD has in mind for this acquisition but I
| could see there being a lot of value having an in house LLM team
| to create models for customers to build on, run in benchmarks,
| and improve their products.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Yes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software
| that induces demand for their GPUs.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| The biggest frameworks are still from other players though.
| Pytorch, tensorflow and jax aren't funded by Nvidia.
| stanleykm wrote:
| But they are built on top of nvidia tooling and you can use
| nvidia tools to do more extensive profiling than other
| players offer.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| True, gotta love Nsight Systems and Compute.
|
| That's the first hurdle of working with AMD GPUs, I have
| no idea what the GPU is actually doing because there is
| no quality profiler.
| Conscat wrote:
| Is Omniperf/Omnitrace not very good? I haven't used it,
| but I have been using Nsight Systems recently and it
| looks comparable to me at a glance.
| mcbuilder wrote:
| No way would any of those have any have bindings to backend
| libraries like cuDNN.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Yeah but the frameworks use CUDA in their NVIDIA
| implementation , don't they?
| xyst wrote:
| Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure
| professors use and teach on their platform.
|
| I don't remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but
| only lightly mentioned
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Opencl is horrible compared to cuda
| Narhem wrote:
| Especially since AMD and nVidia have similar costs for a
| GPU
| kcb wrote:
| AMD has hip which is basically a CUDA clone.
| helloericsf wrote:
| OpenCL was discussed more frequently in classes about a
| decade ago. However, I haven't heard it mentioned in the
| last five years or so.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| > Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make
| sure professors use and teach on their platform.
|
| Nah. People teach what they use because that's what's easy.
| baumy wrote:
| It's definitely both.
|
| I'm sure plenty of professors use CUDA in their courses
| because it's what they actually use. At the same time, in
| 2013 when I was in college I took a course on "parallel
| computing" as a CS elective. The professor told us on day
| 1 that NVidia was sponsoring the course and had donated a
| bunch of GPUs to the clusters we could remotely connect
| into for the sake of the class. Naturally we used CUDA
| exclusively.
|
| I know for a fact that this happened at a lot of schools.
| I don't know if it's still happening since I'm not in
| that world anymore, but don't see why it would have
| stopped.
| Narhem wrote:
| CUDA is extremely simple, the classes might as well be on
| rails. OpenCL is like impossible without graphics and/or
| CUDA/distributed computing/operating system experience.
| alphabeta2024 wrote:
| You get free access to hardware for courses if you teach
| CUDA courses.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure
| professors use and teach on their platform.
|
| Do you have a source for this claim? Or do you simply mean
| that since they spend money making it better that
| professors end up using it on their own accord?
| flakiness wrote:
| They co-author the definitive CUDA textbook, and it's
| based on their sponsored class (You can find the story in
| the intro of the book.)
| https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Massively-Parallel-
| Proces...
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Co authoring a book is not "metric shit ton of money".
| physicsguy wrote:
| I hold an NVidia instructors cert from when I worked in
| academia. They even give you access to hardware while
| you're running courses on it. It's super easy and totally
| free.
| nojvek wrote:
| I won an Nvidia GPU while I was doing my advanced
| graphics course for making custom shaders.
|
| Had to buy a new power supply just so I could use it.
| Narhem wrote:
| Not exactly but they give massive discounts and the tools
| are much more appropriate to use for late undergrads and
| grads.
| wsay wrote:
| As someone who has designed and taught those courses, my
| experience (admittedly only one persons) is that you pick
| what will work with the least hassle - because you'll have
| plenty of hassle elsewhere and probably no real time to
| deal with any of it without making more.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| This is actually one of my favorite comments of all time,
| because it's how software wins. The software that
| students use is the software the industry uses about five
| years later.
| Narhem wrote:
| No nvidia makes great tooling. Like as a startup if I had to
| pick a development tool AmD fails repeatedly while nvida
| tooling is like matlab level of usefulness.
|
| Those companies have money to make 'nice' things which open
| source software doesn't have the time to do.
|
| For 100m you could probably make some pretty sweet clones if
| amd is hiring anybody to man that position.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| The success of CUDA is basically a dual effect of AMD devices
| being inefficient and bad for years, plus AMD having no answer
| to CUDA for a solid 7+ years while the foundations of GPGPU
| were being laid down.
|
| Mindshare shifts slowly.
| chidli1234 wrote:
| It's an acquisition, usually for patents/IP. There will be
| layoffs.
| pjietr wrote:
| I guess their growth strategy was mostly about hiring every
| Finnish person, or living in Finland (and then in other
| countries) with a PhD in some quantitative topic and then
| market the "we have xx PhDs as a consultancy for all your
| projects". So you probably are right that not all these are
| needed anymore?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| AMD is (according to their own statements) in the process of
| picking up a lot of software manpower. And wages in Finland
| are European tier, not US West Coast. Why lay them off?
| jacobgorm wrote:
| This happened after Silo trained an LLM on the AMD-powered LUMI
| supercomputer.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Seems like an excellent exit strategy in hindsight. Spend a
| gazillion dollars of investor money on AMD hardware, get bought
| back by AMD because you worked out how to use that hardware
| jacobgorm wrote:
| Except the EU paid for the hardware https://eurohpc-
| ju.europa.eu/supercomputers/our-supercompute...
| Pandabob wrote:
| Came here to point this out. Silo never had to invest huge
| amounts on GPUs. A shrewd move by the founders.
| rubatuga wrote:
| There is debate about public investment into private
| ventures, but in this case it may provide long term
| benefits to Finland
| petesergeant wrote:
| Even better!
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Where in that source does it claim that Silo didn't have to
| pay to use the hardware?
| jacobgorm wrote:
| I don't think it is possible to pay for access to LUMI. I
| know my company has been in talks about getting free
| access as it sits under utilized most of the time. These
| supercomputers are mostly vanity projects for EU
| politicians, there is no commercial use case.
| kakoni wrote:
| Well actually it was Silo + Turku University's TurkuNLP group
| [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/resources/c...
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I've been thinking that NVDA stock is massively overpriced - yes,
| AI is a hot topic, but their only advantage is the software
| stack. It is just a matter of time until Intel and AMD realize
| that they should join hands and do an open-source CUDA
| alternative for their respecitve GPUs (yes, Intel has competetive
| GPUs and just like AMD and Nvidia they will try to get a share of
| the AI chip market share).
| airstrike wrote:
| "just" a matter of time... If it were that easy, it would have
| already been done, or so they say. Also don't forget network
| effects
| wmf wrote:
| They've been working on that for years.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yeah? And? So? As if CUDA was developed overnight and never
| worked on again. Such a weak comment
| zokier wrote:
| AMD has been working on GPGPU at least as long as nVidia.
|
| AMDs "CTM" SDK was released in 2006, same year as CUDA. In
| 2007 they released Stream SDK. Then they had "APP SDK" for
| a while, which iirc coincided with their opencl phase. And
| now they landed on rocm.
|
| Meanwhile nvidia has kept trucking with just CUDA.
| RyanShook wrote:
| 2024 YTD returns: NVDA 172% AMD 27% INTC -30%
| cj wrote:
| Stocks of companies that develop extremely niche and
| technical things is a tiny sliver of the stock market that I
| actually think communities like HN would be better at valuing
| than the market.
|
| Technology stocks are the only ones I personally day trade
| for that reason. Example: at the beginning of a pandemic
| lockdowns, any HN user could have anticipated increased
| internet usage and buy Cloudflare/Fastly stock and made a lot
| of money before the rest of the market realized that CDN
| companies will significantly benefit from that specific macro
| event.
|
| I'm not convinced the market (or market analysts) have a deep
| understanding of Nividia's long-term advantage. If they did,
| we would have seen a much slower and steadier valuation
| increase rather than the meteoric rise. Meteoric stock price
| rise/fall = the market is having trouble valuing the stock.
|
| In other words, stock prices don't add much to the
| conversation.
| storyinmemo wrote:
| Intel's profit, and revenue, have declined for 3
| consecutive years. Their price to earnings ratio is 36.
|
| Nvidia's revenue is now greater than Intel's with 20% of
| the employees that Intel has. Their PE ratio is 78, roughly
| double that of Intel.
|
| The market valued Nvidia as growing and Intel as not.
| breggles wrote:
| "AMD is among several companies contributing to the development
| of an OpenAI-led rival to Cuda, called Triton, which would let
| AI developers switch more easily between chip providers. Meta,
| Microsoft and Intel have also worked on Triton."
|
| Last paragraph
| singhrac wrote:
| This is a bit misleading since Triton is a bit higher level
| than CUDA. But the idea is kind of right - there's active
| development of AMD and Intel backends, and Pytorch is
| investing into Triton as well.
| nabla9 wrote:
| > Intel has competitive GPUs
|
| No they don't. Both Intel and AMD compare their newest GPU
| favorably against Nvidia's H100 that has been on the market
| longer and soon to be replaced and then it's never H100 NVL for
| a reason.
|
| Intel and AMD can sell their GPU's only with lower profit
| margin. If they could match FLOPS per total ownership they
| would sell much better.
|
| Both are years behind.
| latchkey wrote:
| Benchmarks were just run, MI300x is onpar/better than an
| H100. Next generation of MI (MI325x) is coming out end of the
| year and those specs look fantastic too. Especially on the
| all important memory front. 288GB is fantastic.
|
| Both companies will leapfrog each other with new releases.
| Anyone who believes that there should only be a single vendor
| for all AI compute will quickly find themselves on the wrong
| side of history
| nabla9 wrote:
| Comparisons against H100 I have seen are always:
| 8x AMD MI300X (192GB, 750W) 8x H100 SXM5 (80GB,
| 700W)
|
| Never against 8x H100 NVL (188GB, <800W)
|
| What the customer does not see is how AMD must spend 2
| times more money to produce a chip that is competitive
| against architecture that is soon 2 years old.
| latchkey wrote:
| > Never against 8x H100 NVL (188GB, <800W)
|
| Probably because they aren't widely available yet. It is
| also a dual card to get that much memory, which is still
| less than 192GB and far less than 288GB.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/18780/nvidia-
| announces-h100-n...
|
| > What the customer does not see is how AMD must spend
| 8-10 times more money to produce a chip that is
| competitive against architecture that is soon 2 years
| old.
|
| Source?
| talldayo wrote:
| > 288GB is fantastic
|
| This reminds me of those "192GB is fantastic" people that
| bought maxed-out M2 Ultras for AI inference. It _can_ be
| awesome, but you need a substantial amount of interconnect
| bandwidth and powerful enough local compute before it 's
| competitive. In products where AI is an afterthought,
| you're fighting against much different constraints than
| just having a lot of high-bandwidth memory.
|
| I've always rooted for Team Red when they made an effort to
| do things open-source and transparently. They're a good
| role-model for the rest of the industry, in a certain
| sense. But I have to make peace with the fact that client-
| side AI running on my AMD machines isn't happening.
| Meanwhile, I've been using CUDA, CUDNN, CUBLAS, DLSS, on my
| Nvidia machine for years. _On Linux!_
| dehrmann wrote:
| NVDA's moat is over-stated. There are several deep-pocketed
| players with pretty good AI chips. The big players are training
| models at such a large scale that they can afford to back them
| by different architectures. Smaller players use frameworks like
| Pytorch and Tensorflow, but those are backed by big players
| buying from Nvidia.
|
| But valuation isn't the NVDA trade right now; it's that there's
| still a bigger fool.
| nipponese wrote:
| NVDA P/E ratio 78.70
|
| AMD P/E ratio 263.25
|
| If NVDA is overpriced, AMD is REALLY over-priced.
| hmm37 wrote:
| AMD PE ratio is that high due to their purchase of Xilinx.
| It's forward PE ratio is much much lower, in the 50s.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| I'm curious, how does the all-stock acquisition that closed
| 2.5 years ago affect their trailing P/E but not their
| forward P/E ?
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| Problem is the CUDA advantage is gigantic and it has been known
| for years in GPGPU processing, way before AI was a meme. AMD
| has lost countless developers over the year just on hello world
| style projects. Developers had a solid 6-7 years of living with
| OpenCL when the green rival had a very mature and nice CUDA
| sitting there. I've been out of that world for a while now, but
| it was truly painful and turned a lot of devs off programming
| AMD devices. Now there's a big moat of entrenched developers
| that could take decades to displace. It's like trying to
| displace C++ with Java 22 -- possible, but it's a slow, slow
| trudge and everyone still remembers Java 1.4
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| No, the amount of code written in CUDA for pytorch could
| easily be rewritten in CUDA for few million or tens of
| millions of investment. The problem is that it is damn near
| impossible to get good performance in AMD. For complicated
| CUDA programs like flash attention(few 100 lines of code), no
| amount of developers could write those few 100 lines for AMD
| to get the same performance.
| postmeta wrote:
| pytorch already supports AMD with device=cuda
|
| already opensourced ROCm/HIP
|
| https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/fb8876069d89aaf27cc9...
| pavlov wrote:
| The economic mood in Finland is downright depressed [1]. This
| kind of news is therefore extremely welcome because it indicates
| there's a way forward, out of the old industry doldrums where
| people are still moaning about closed paper mills and Nokia's
| failure 15 years ago.
|
| $665M USD isn't a staggering number by Silicon Valley standards,
| but it's very significant for a nation of five million people
| that hasn't seen global startup successes like neighboring Sweden
| with Spotify and others.
|
| [1] The actual level of depression is somewhat hard to track
| because Finns are always pessimistic regardless of how well
| they're doing. (This also makes them the happiest people on Earth
| in polls. The situation right now is never quite as bad as one
| had expected beforehand, so when a pollster calls to ask, the
| conclusion must be that they're pretty happy with things overall
| at that specific moment, but surely everything is going in the
| wrong direction anyway.)
| SebaSeba wrote:
| Contrary to what you say, Finnish startups have been very
| successful. Here's just a couple examples:
|
| - Supercell sold 81.4% stake to Tencent in 2018 with a
| valuation of $10.2 billion.
|
| - Wolt was acquired by DoorDash in 2021 with a valuation of
| $8.1 billion.
|
| The list is much longer with startups that currently generate
| revenues of tens or hundreds of millions in a year that have
| not been sold.
| pavlov wrote:
| These two are great success stories, but they're also the
| only Finnish unicorn exits in the post-Nokia era.
|
| The exits were somewhat less exciting to founders than these
| numbers suggest. Supercell sold 51% to SoftBank already in
| 2013 for 1.1B EUR. And Wolt's purchase price was paid
| entirely in DoorDash stock which was down 75% by the time the
| lockups expired.
|
| Startups generating low-hundreds of millions in annual
| revenue just aren't unicorns anymore, unless they happen to
| be AI.
| SebaSeba wrote:
| Both Supercell and Wolt have their headquarters steadily in
| Finland. The founders and Finnish early investors have
| gained hundreds of millions or billions of euros wealth for
| themselves which they have further spended and invested in
| Finland. They have paid huge amounts of taxes and keep on
| doing all of these since they are still located in Finland.
| It's hard to downplay the value of those IMO. Overall Rovio
| wasn't a complete disaster either. First made billions of
| euros for many years and was later sold to Sega for >$700
| million. Still has HQ in Finland.
|
| There's plenty of interesting and fast growing startups
| still left here. For example Supermetrics, Varjo, Smartly,
| Iceye, Aiven to name a few. IMO you are being pessimistic.
| SebaSeba wrote:
| In any case, I agree in that the acquisition is great
| news and the economy is in a depression. :) Huge part of
| it is because Finnish mortgages are mostly straight tied
| to Euribor unlike in other Euro countries and since post
| covid the interest rates went up, Finns got f*cked.
| Hopefully the Euribor interest rate will be going down
| and the mortgages will start to become smaller, at least
| when they are being paid off.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| In 2023, Finland has received the highest investment of private
| equity and VC adjusted for GDP in all of Europe:
| https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/en/articles/breaking-news/20...
| pavlov wrote:
| Which is great, but doesn't move the needle of popular
| perception the same way as large acquisitions and IPOs do.
|
| The start of the startup investment pipeline in Finland has
| been flowing pretty well. The outputs at the end of the
| pipeline have been more questionable. Silo's acquisition is a
| positive example of activity at that end.
| airstrike wrote:
| Free Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amd-
| acquire-finnish-st...
|
| Joint AMD / Silo AI press release: https://ir.amd.com/news-
| events/press-releases/detail/1206/am...
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Happy to see this acquisition landing in Finland, but I have to
| wonder how the purchase price is justified. Silo AI is primarily
| a consulting company doing "traditional" kinds of AI consulting
| projects. Their LLM project is like a side hustle for the
| company.
| nicce wrote:
| Personally, I am bit sad that nothing stays in Finland. Too
| many promising companies have been sold into foreign countries
| recently. Just because founders look for exit strategy (not
| claiming that it is the case here). Not good for Finland in
| general.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Well, in this case the purchase price appears grossly
| overpriced. So even though Finland lost an AI startup, it
| gained money that is worth more than the startup. That money
| will to a large extent flow back into the Finnish economy in
| the form of taxes, investment in new startups, etc.
| nicce wrote:
| > That money will to a large extent flow back into the
| Finnish economy in the form of taxes, investment in new
| startups, etc.
|
| Short term gains, in terms of taxes.
|
| Otherwise, there are no guarantees for that. Shareholders
| might just make some castle. Who knows. Or move away to
| different country.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| > Shareholders might just make some castle.
|
| And then be left with nothing?
|
| Look at Silo's About page.
|
| The people who started this are not slackers or already
| had so much money before that they could have bought a
| 3rd Porsche.
|
| Do you think these people will pull back and do nothing
| as their ability to benefit from and shape the
| technological advances happening just increases with this
| exit?
|
| I highly doubt that.
|
| > Or move away to different country.
|
| And then?
|
| Capital is global. And as per these [0] statistics,
| Finland is ranked 4th for per capita VC money invested in
| 2018, far ahead of France and Germany.
|
| As per this [1] article from May, Finland received the
| most private equity and VC investment adjusted for GDP in
| all of Europe in 2023.
|
| Finland is an attractive country to invest in, and I
| highly doubt native speakers with an excellent local
| network - i.e. much more expertise than the average non-
| Finnish speaking invesotor - will not be aware of that
| and capitalize on it.
|
| [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/879124/venture-
| capital-a...
|
| [1]:
| https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/en/articles/breaking-
| news/20...
| bjornsing wrote:
| But hats off to Finland for producing these companies. Here
| in Sweden there's pretty much nothing in cloud computing or
| AI, AFAIK.
| kakoni wrote:
| Well in Finland we seem to produce promising "early-stage"
| companies which are then eagerly sold to bigger players. Vs
| in Sweden there is will (and capital) to keep growing
| these.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm more so for taking money off the table when possible.
| Future returns are future returns, they can materialize, but
| might not.
| nicce wrote:
| But if that happens (almost) every time for a potential
| company, then you will never likely have successful company
| in Finland, where the decision making also stays in
| Finland, and the money benefits the country in larger
| scale.
|
| There is this saying that "don't sell the cow when you can
| sell the milk" - maybe there is still some wisdom... but
| Finland keeps selling the cow and buying the milk back over
| and over again. And then they wonder why the state of the
| economy is so sad and they never see "new Nokia".
| bee_rider wrote:
| Looking at their "about" page,
|
| https://www.silo.ai/about
|
| It looks like 300 "AI experts" employed. So I guess they have
| paid $2M a pop. I'm not sure how to put that into perspective
| really, though...
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _It looks like 300 "AI experts" employed. So I guess they
| have paid $2M a pop._
|
| What was the per employee acquisition cost of WhatsApp (who
| had 50 employees, IIRC)?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| When acquiring a telecommunications network, I suspect that
| network size (user count) is far more relevant for
| valuation, if anything, having a low employee count with a
| massive network like WhatsApp was probably a huge selling
| point.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Wow. I hope this is blocked by the DoJ on antitrust grounds.
| duxup wrote:
| Arguably as far as anti trust grounds go wouldn't AMD being a
| more viable competitor in the AI space be ... good?
| wantsanagent wrote:
| I'm curious how this deal happened. There are a lot of LLM shops
| out there, how did this nordic co get the attention of AMD and
| why did they think this co stood out among the crowd.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| They had their team use AMD to train LLMs
| samuell wrote:
| They've been around since before the LLM era? (I learned about
| them in 2018)
| hmaxwell wrote:
| This is a nothing burger compared to amazon and google giving $4b
| and $2b respectively to Anthropic
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Smells fishy anti trust
| bot0047 wrote:
| If nVidia is IBM then AMD could be the next Microsoft.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I don't know how this specific acquisition is going to work out,
| but at least we can say one thing. This represents _some_ kind of
| response to the constant chorus of "AMD don't appreciate the
| importance of software. AMD should invest more in software. CUDA,
| CUDA, CUDA" comments that one always hears when AMD is mentioned.
|
| Of course there's room to debate the details here: would they
| have, perhaps, been better off investing that money in their
| existing software team(s)? Or spinning up (a) new team(s) from
| scatch? Who's to say. But at least it show some intention on
| their behalf to beef up their software stance, and generally
| speaking that feels like a positive step to me.
|
| But then again, I'm an AMD fan boi who is invested in the ROCm
| ecosystem, so I'm not entirely unbiased. But I think the overall
| point stands, regardless of that.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| AMD has _also_ been doing a bunch of hiring for their software
| teams. I 've seen a few colleagues that AMD previously couldn't
| have afforded accept offers to work on GPU stuff.
| viewtransform wrote:
| Look on the AMD careers website. There are a lot of software
| jobs related to AI and the pay has gone upto 300K/yr (in
| Santa Clara) .
| getcrunk wrote:
| I'm still pissed they finally brought rocm support to their Gpgus
| on windows starting with the 6800xt ... I have the 6700xt
| trhway wrote:
| $2M/head. That is a steal, even by European standards.
|
| "In July 2024, Silo AI has 300+ employees out of which 125+ hold
| a PhD degree."
| yoouareperfect wrote:
| If AMD and Intel team up on soft to replace CUDA, then I'm
| selling all my NVDA stock and even shorting it short term
| machinekob wrote:
| They tried SYCL and no one is using it
| samuell wrote:
| Forbes has a free-to-read article:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2024/07/10/amd-...
| non-e-moose wrote:
| Former AMD employee here (2007-2012) AMD 'dropped the ball' BADLY
| when (2012) then-VP Ben Bar-Haim decided to do a software purge,
| and focused on retaining the over-bureaucratic folks of
| ATI/Markham. Net result: NVidia was (and did) pick up a lot of
| very smart researchers and developers from AMD (I know of a
| couple whom were thoroughly disgusted with AMD management at that
| time)
|
| He also trashed a lot of good and useful software projects for
| seemingly protectionist reasons (if it wasn't ATI/Markham, it was
| dumped)
| glzone1 wrote:
| Wasn't there a point at which AMD was actually looking at
| buying nvidia but Jensen wanted to be something like CEO.
| Jensen actually worked at AMD so there was already a connection
| there.
|
| Instead AMD bought ATI which if I remember was barely hanging
| on. Not saying it was a bad purchase, just interesting that a
| bet on ATI (always had buggy drivers in my experience) which
| hadn't really demonstrated success ... how decisions ripple for
| a while.
| vegabook wrote:
| This is an indictment of Lisa Su's own ROCm strategy. An implicit
| admission of failure, without explicitly admitting it. I predict
| this acquisition will cause even more software schizophreny
| inside AMD as multiple conflicting teams pinball their way around
| towards nowhere in particular.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Amd once bought an ARM server manufacturer. It went down the
| tubes. I don't think this will work either.
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