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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
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.
>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.
they have loyal and stable staff with healthy family lives unlike 8 of 10 California companies
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.
What if I told you that non - competes aren't a thing in Germany. (And a big part in other parts of US)
Well I'd tell you that they aren't a thing in California.
...as of six months ago.
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.
A job at SiloAI pays about 75k annually (source: lived in Finland), and close to zero equity. For that same function and seniority at OpenAI, the comp is 300-500k and 300-500k weird equity.
People underestimate the compensation differences for top tier talent in each country. Consumption costs are practically irrelevant. And not that it matters, but medical insurance is part of US employment, and don't even get me started on top marginal tax rates, and the income level at which they kick in. Or the unbounded 25% Finnish social security contribution.
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...
employee loyalty is a good thing if it's bought and not expected
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).
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.
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
Comparisons against H100 I have seen are always:
8x AMD MI300X (192GB, 750W)
8x H100 SXM5 (80GB, 700W)
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.
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?
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!
2024 YTD returns: NVDA 172% AMD 27% INTC -30%
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.
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.
Meteoric sudden rise in stock price means that the market didn't anticipate how quickly Nvidia's value (however the market defines that) would grow.
Given that, I wouldn't particularly trust the market's ability to judge the future of the variables that will determine its valuation 2-3 years from now.
They've been working on that for years.
Yeah? And? So? As if CUDA was developed overnight and never worked on again. Such a weak comment
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.
"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
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.
NVDA P/E ratio 78.70
AMD P/E ratio 263.25
If NVDA is overpriced, AMD is REALLY over-priced.
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.
"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
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.
Yes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software that induces demand for their GPUs.
The biggest frameworks are still from other players though. Pytorch, tensorflow and jax aren't funded by Nvidia.
But they are built on top of nvidia tooling and you can use nvidia tools to do more extensive profiling than other players offer.
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.
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.
No way would any of those have any have bindings to backend libraries like cuDNN.
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
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.
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.
Opencl is horrible compared to cuda
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
But hats off to Finland for producing these companies. Here in Sweden there’s pretty much nothing in cloud computing or AI, AFAIK.
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.
I'm more so for taking money off the table when possible. Future returns are future returns, they can materialize, but might not.
Looking at their “about” page,
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…
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)?
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.
Imagine AMD simply put that $665M into tooling and driver development. The stock probably would have doubled.
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 $665M, could do a lot with that.
You are basically paying some premium for the fact that someone already did the hiring and built the talent pool and a cohesive team. Doing that from scratch is a multi-year project, so they basically bought a shortcut.
Yeah I get the general idea that you're paying more for the assembled team and software / experience.
It's just always wonky as acquisitions generally don't seem to be 100% known quantities / outcomes. People paying big premiums for what sometimes turn out to be nothing.
That package of talent and etc is handy, but also seems like sometimes it makes it harder to really know what you'll get out of it. It's an interesting dynamic.
What's the difference to what they did in this acquisition?
Who's gonna improve tooling and develop drivers?
PhD level AI experts such as employed by Silo AI, probably, right?
EDIT: For context [0], Nvidia invested billions into CUDA development way back when it was unsexy.
Clearly a second mover won't need that much, Nvidia proved the market.
But a billion doesn't seem like a large sum for the potential upside of AMD catching a significantly larger share of the budget going into AI - many times the value of this acquisition.
0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-hua...
Perhaps their goal is to develop an LLM and then prompt it to fix ROCm.
The org structure and culture dynamics of large companies like AMD makes it very difficult to achieve quality results when starting from scratch. 665M$ 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_.
also note they paid in cash.. usually a premium in itself.
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".
This happened after Silo trained an LLM on the AMD-powered LUMI supercomputer.
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
Except the EU paid for the hardware https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/supercomputers/our-supercompute...
Came here to point this out. Silo never had to invest huge amounts on GPUs. A shrewd move by the founders.
There is debate about public investment into private ventures, but in this case it may provide long term benefits to Finland
Even better!
Where in that source does it claim that Silo didn't have to pay to use the hardware?
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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.
What are they going to give AMD that they are priced this high?
Expert talent and prob some in house tech.
Mainly talent I guess which they can put to accelerating Triton development, their alternative to CUDA.
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.
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.
Did you mean ROCm? afaik Triton is a python framework that sits on top of CUDA and ROCm.
This and the MI300x makes me hopeful for AMD
It really is a fantastic piece of hardware. We just need the software to catch up.
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.
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.
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).
Looks like a consulting company[1] at first glance. Also, empty HuggingFace account[2].
[1]: https://www.silo.ai/ [2]: https://huggingface.co/SiloAI
Who is downvoting this? You are correct. Silo.AI is a consulting company with an LLM side hustle. This acquisition is weird.
Looks like they have expertise in using AMD gpus to train LLMs and will be tasked to catch up to cuda
The models are here: https://huggingface.co/LumiOpen
Anyone know a timeline for AMD on MLPerf?
AMD is already on MLPerf in the form of the tinybox red :)
They should have bought tiny for 600 million ;)
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...
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.
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!
See @helsinkiandrews comment, he posted the de-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/33O61
Because everyone knows how to use archive.org
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.
They had their team use AMD to train LLMs
Wow. I hope this is blocked by the DoJ on antitrust grounds.
Arguably as far as anti trust grounds go wouldn't AMD being a more viable competitor in the AI space be ... good?
Smells fishy anti trust
This is a nothing burger compared to amazon and google giving $4b and $2b respectively to Anthropic
If nVidia is IBM then AMD could be the next Microsoft.
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...
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.
Sure, buying this company for 600m will fix everything.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Sure, there is some overlap. Is that overlap worth 665M?
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.
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.
Anyway, it seems market thinks this is a 20x value acquisition.
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.
You all live in a simple world where complex systems are fixed in simple statements like software stack is all they need.
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".
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?
"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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
What do you think they should do?
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.
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.
I am curious if the models are any good, though. The landscape is so fragmented I never heard of Poro.
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.
Gpt4 or even 3.5 is quite good at Finnish. Was there ever a benchmark against closed source models?
So AMD wants to know how they did it, understand.
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
That's an unfortunate choice. AMD has excelled in making compatible hardware. Not so much software success, if any.
Silo.ai is mostly a consulting house for various proof-of-concept type of projects with the LLM product being only the recent addition
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,”
Silo mainly does consulting and those models were kinda done on side. But great for founders and truly weird acquisition for AMD.
Maybe they can use LLMs now to program their platform for them? </snark or not really>