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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.
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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.
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?
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 persp…
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
Wow. I hope this is blocked by the DoJ on antitrust grounds.
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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)?
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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.
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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...