Looks like a consulting company[1] at first glance. Also, empty HuggingFace account[2]. [1]: https://www.silo.ai/ [2]: https://huggingface.co/SiloAI
The models are here: https://huggingface.co/LumiOpen
AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
11–20 of 284 posts
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#12What 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.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#13Huge 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.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#14This and the MI300x makes me hopeful for AMD
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#15Huge 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.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#16My 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?
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?
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#17Imagine AMD simply put that $665M into tooling and driver development. The stock probably would have doubled.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#18Imagine AMD simply put that $665M into tooling and driver development. The stock probably would have doubled.
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...
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#19What 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.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#20Imagine 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.