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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

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Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#31

Post by eightysixfour »

mastax wrote: post #24

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…

Yes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software that induces demand for their GPUs.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#32

Post by speed_spread »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #17

Imagine AMD simply put that $665M into tooling and driver development. The stock probably would have doubled.

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_.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#33

Post by petesergeant »

jacobgorm wrote: post #29

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

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#34

Post by littlecranky67 »

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).

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#35

Post by pavlov »

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.)

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#36

Post by petesergeant »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #17

Imagine AMD simply put that $665M into tooling and driver development. The stock probably would have doubled.

> 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".

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#37

Post by zacksiri »

anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #8
SSLy wrote: post #4

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?

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.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#39

Post by sqeaky »

eysgshsvsvsv wrote: post #30
sqeaky wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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".

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#40

Post by mistrial9 »

speed_spread wrote: post #32
Workaccount2 wrote: post #17

Imagine AMD simply put that $665M into tooling and driver development. The stock probably would have doubled.

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.
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