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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

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221–230 of 284 posts

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#221
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No nvidia makes great tooling. Like as a startup if I had to pick a development tool AmD fails repeatedly while nvida tooling is like matlab level of usefulness. Those companies have money to make ‘nice’ things which open source software doesn’t have the time to do. For 100m you could probably make some pretty sweet clones if amd is hiring anybody to man that position.

>Those companies have money to make ‘nice’ things which open source software doesn’t have the time to do.

I would posit it's a lack of will rather than time.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#222

If AMD and Intel team up on soft to replace CUDA, then I'm selling all my NVDA stock and even shorting it short term

They tried SYCL and no one is using it

SYCL also doesn't meet the listed requirement of 'Intel and AMD teaming up'. Intel seems to be the only hardware vendor to actually care about SYCL, and AMD is instead backing HIP which is 'standardized' but boils down to 'just take cuda and run :s/cu/hip/g'.

If AMD were to work on SYCL tooling and, say, build a 'syclcc' next to 'hipcc' that ingested SYCL to run it on ROCm, I feel like interest in SYCL could potentially grow, since Intel is supporting it properly already and it would be actually a cross-vendor standard.

Codeplay (which is part of Intel) does provide 'plugins' to run oneAPI (SYCL) on NVIDIA and AMD hardware, which is great but is still being made, indirectly, by Intel, who in the end want to sell Intel hardware.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benchmarks were just run, MI300x is onpar/better than an H100. Next generation of MI (MI325x) is coming out end of the year and those specs look fantastic too. Especially on the all important memory front. 288GB is fantastic. Both companies will leapfrog each other with new releases. Anyone who believes that there should only be a single vendor for all AI compute will quickly find themselves on the wrong side of hist…

> 288GB is fantastic This reminds me of those "192GB is fantastic" people that bought maxed-out M2 Ultras for AI inference. It can be awesome, but you need a substantial amount of interconnect bandwidth and powerful enough local compute before it's competitive. In products where AI is an afterthought, you're fighting against much different constraints than just having a lot of high-bandwidth memory. I've always roote…

This response feels like you could be conflating desktop usage with enterprise compute?

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#224

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

An inverse Nadella, wherein you buy a chunk of OpenAI and they turn around and buy a bunch of Azure time (then give it away to people on ChatGPT cuz ain't no one about making money in that business)

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#225
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No nvidia makes great tooling. Like as a startup if I had to pick a development tool AmD fails repeatedly while nvida tooling is like matlab level of usefulness. Those companies have money to make ‘nice’ things which open source software doesn’t have the time to do. For 100m you could probably make some pretty sweet clones if amd is hiring anybody to man that position.

I don’t understand what you are disagreeing with.

Nvidia makes software that induces demand for their products. Sometimes that software is a tool, or a platform, or an ML model, or foundational research on algorithms.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#226

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.

That’s ignoring a huge swath of software nvidia uses to push industry forwards (in the direction they want it to go).

Omniverse, Isaac, Metropolis, Rapids, etc.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#227
post #144

Earlier 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

[flagged]

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#228
post #55

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox might be interesting to read.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#229
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is actually one of my favorite comments of all time, because it's how software wins. The software that students use is the software the industry uses about five years later.

> The software that students use is the software the industry uses about five years later.

which is why it's anti-competitive for a company to sponsor university courses (such as providing educational versions for free). It should be disallowed, unless the course is _specifically_ teaching the software, rather than a general course.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#230
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually one of my favorite comments of all time, because it's how software wins. The software that students use is the software the industry uses about five years later.

> The software that students use is the software the industry uses about five years later. which is why it's anti-competitive for a company to sponsor university courses (such as providing educational versions for free). It should be disallowed, unless the course is _specifically_ teaching the software, rather than a general course.

That's competitive, not anti-competitive.

Anti-competitive means others are not allowed to do the same.

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