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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

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Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#71

Post by thenaturalist »

627467 wrote: post #55
thenaturalist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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…

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.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#72

Post by nicce »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #66
nicce wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#73

Post by singhrac »

627467 wrote: post #55
thenaturalist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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…

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).

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#74

Post by bee_rider »

627467 wrote: post #55
thenaturalist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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…

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.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#75

Post by singhrac »

breggles wrote: post #57
littlecranky67 wrote: post #34

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).

"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.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#76

Post by Rinzler89 »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #51
sva_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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 wher…

>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.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#78

Post by KeplerBoy »

eightysixfour wrote: post #31
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.

The biggest frameworks are still from other players though. Pytorch, tensorflow and jax aren't funded by Nvidia.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#79

Post by [deleted] »

sqeaky wrote: post #39
eysgshsvsvsv wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

[deleted]

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#80

Post by dylan604 »

wmf wrote: post #49
littlecranky67 wrote: post #34

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).

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
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