This happened after Silo trained an LLM on the AMD-powered LUMI supercomputer.
Well actually it was Silo + Turku University's TurkuNLP group [1]
[1] https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/resources/c...
AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
181–190 of 284 posts
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 reve…
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Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software that induces demand for their GPUs.
Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. I don’t remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but only lightly mentioned
Not exactly but they give massive discounts and the tools are much more appropriate to use for late undergrads and grads.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#184I’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…
It's an acquisition, usually for patents/IP. There will be layoffs.
I guess their growth strategy was mostly about hiring every Finnish person, or living in Finland (and then in other countries) with a PhD in some quantitative topic and then market the "we have xx PhDs as a consultancy for all your projects". So you probably are right that not all these are needed anymore?
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. Nah. People teach what they use because that's what's easy.
It's definitely both. I'm sure plenty of professors use CUDA in their courses because it's what they actually use. At the same time, in 2013 when I was in college I took a course on "parallel computing" as a CS elective. The professor told us on day 1 that NVidia was sponsoring the course and had donated a bunch of GPUs to the clusters we could remotely connect into for the sake of the class. Naturally we used CUDA e…
CUDA is extremely simple, the classes might as well be on rails. OpenCL is like impossible without graphics and/or CUDA/distributed computing/operating system experience.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. I don’t remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but only lightly mentioned
Opencl is horrible compared to cuda
Especially since AMD and nVidia have similar costs for a GPU
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software that induces demand for their GPUs.
Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. I don’t remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but only lightly mentioned
As someone who has designed and taught those courses, my experience (admittedly only one persons) is that you pick what will work with the least hassle - because you'll have plenty of hassle elsewhere and probably no real time to deal with any of it without making more.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. I don’t remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but only lightly mentioned
>Nvidia also spends a metric shit ton of money to make sure professors use and teach on their platform. Do you have a source for this claim? Or do you simply mean that since they spend money making it better that professors end up using it on their own accord?
I hold an NVidia instructors cert from when I worked in academia. They even give you access to hardware while you’re running courses on it. It’s super easy and totally free.
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
NVDA P/E ratio 78.70 AMD P/E ratio 263.25 If NVDA is overpriced, AMD is REALLY over-priced.
AMD PE ratio is that high due to their purchase of Xilinx. It's forward PE ratio is much much lower, in the 50s.
I'm curious, how does the all-stock acquisition that closed 2.5 years ago affect their trailing P/E but not their forward P/E ?
Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
#190I don't know how this specific acquisition is going to work out, but at least we can say one thing. This represents some kind of response to the constant chorus of "AMD don't appreciate the importance of software. AMD should invest more in software. CUDA, CUDA, CUDA" comments that one always hears when AMD is mentioned. Of course there's room to debate the details here: would they have, perhaps, been better off inves…
AMD has also been doing a bunch of hiring for their software teams. I've seen a few colleagues that AMD previously couldn't have afforded accept offers to work on GPU stuff.
Look on the AMD careers website. There are a lot of software jobs related to AI and the pay has gone upto 300K/yr (in Santa Clara) .