Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 284 posts

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#81

Post by lyu07282 »

sqeaky wrote: post #16
csomar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#82

Post by thenaturalist »

nicce wrote: post #72
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#83

Post by thenaturalist »

pavlov wrote: post #35

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 glo…

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...

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#84

Post by rcarmo »

zacksiri wrote: post #37
anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sof…

I am curious if the models are any good, though. The landscape is so fragmented I never heard of Poro.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#85

Post by jacobgorm »

petesergeant wrote: post #33
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

Except the EU paid for the hardware https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/supercomputers/our-supercompute...

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#86

Post by pavlov »

SebaSeba wrote: post #69
pavlov wrote: post #35

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 glo…

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.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#87

Post by throw0101c »

bee_rider wrote: post #65
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #47

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.

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…

> 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)?

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#88

Post by stanleykm »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #78
eightysixfour wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#89

Post by throwway120385 »

lyu07282 wrote: post #81
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?

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.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#90

Post by pjc50 »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #76
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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.

Post reply on HN