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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

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Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#231

Post by ClumsyPilot »

thenaturalist wrote: post #71
627467 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> geniously recognized the value of free and global trade and invested heavily in its Navy to enable and protect said trade

This reads like a person taking credit for the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

United States is rich for three reasons:

Firstly USA stole textile and other technology from the British empire.

Secondly, gen 1 ‘non-free trade’ empires like the British got demolished in the war. All of the world’s industrial nations were in ruins.

Third step, the ‘genius’ was the Marshall Plan, was giving reconstruction loans to British and the French that they could only spend on American products - remember their industry was demolished, further stimulating American economy.

Global trade grew after 1955 when we invented containerisation.

And USA does not really believe in global free trade - that’s for its club of friends. Everyone else gets a sudden 100% solar panel tax or a 100% ev tax when they want to export to US. Or they get a sudden coup if their government wanted to stop exporting bananas to US

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#232

Post by chii »

paulddraper wrote: post #230
chii wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> others are not allowed to do the same.

it's usually the case where the sponsor is the sole sponsors (aka, the course does not teach both X and Y, esp. if X is given to the uni for free).

It's anti-competitive to allow companies to embed themselves in general courses, despite it not being so by the letter of the laws.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#233

Post by joe_the_user »

mandevil wrote: post #194
joe_the_user wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what means by "business sense". Compatible makers have profited, did profit during PC era. Indeed, one of AMD's core businesses is make xx86 compatible CPUs. Nvidia and standard-maker is limited in what breaking changes they introduce - these can harm their customers as much as they harm the competition. Intel failed to force all their changes on AMD as the xxx86 market expanded (notably, the current itera…

I think the key is that CUDA is much more like the Microsoft Windows software part of the duopoly than the Intel x86 hardware part of the old Wintel duopoly. At best back in the glory days of that era, you could have weird hackish things like WINE ... until Microsoft's business model changed and started being interested in supporting virtualization to build up Azure. The key is that while there were many clones of x8…

CUDA is absolutely not equivalent to Windows as a platform. It's essentially a single API, not a huge, multilayer and futzy platform with multiple weirdly behaved APIs.

Moreover, companies aren't buying GPUs to keep their huge stable of legacy applications running. They want to create new AI applications and CUDA is a simple API for doing that (at a certain level).

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#235

Post by zamfi »

chii wrote: post #232
paulddraper wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's competitive, not anti-competitive. Anti-competitive means others are not allowed to do the same.

> others are not allowed to do the same. it's usually the case where the sponsor is the sole sponsors (aka, the course does not teach both X and Y, esp. if X is given to the uni for free). It's anti-competitive to allow companies to embed themselves in general courses, despite it not being so by the letter of the laws.

Sort of -- but basically no course is going to teach X and Y, if they're functionally equivalent ways to learn about Z, because almost no course is specifically about X or Y, it's about Z, and learning both X and Y isn't germane to learning Z, just learning one is enough.

As long as the companies behind X and Y both have a fair shot at sponsorship, this isn't really anti-competitive. It's literally a competition in which the companies compete for student and faculty attention.

Anti-competitive would be a company saying "you must teach X and not Y in your class about Z because you use Xco's mail services" or some other such abuse of one contractual relationship for an unrelated gain.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#236

Post by [deleted] »

sqeaky wrote: post #219
mindcrime wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about these "licensing issues" you speak of. From what I've seen, the vast majority of the ROCm components are MIT licensed, with a few bits of Apache license and NCSA Open Source License mixed in. Could you possibly elaborate on that?

It has been a while, but last time I got the ROCm drivers and some other items that I needed from them there was a really weird proprietary license. That might not be the case anymore my information might be stale.

[deleted]

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#237

Post by paulddraper »

chii wrote: post #232
paulddraper wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's competitive, not anti-competitive. Anti-competitive means others are not allowed to do the same.

> others are not allowed to do the same. it's usually the case where the sponsor is the sole sponsors (aka, the course does not teach both X and Y, esp. if X is given to the uni for free). It's anti-competitive to allow companies to embed themselves in general courses, despite it not being so by the letter of the laws.

They say "hey if you want to teach a class using X, we'll sponsor it."

A competitor can complete for that sponsorship. So long as it's done on direct merit of the value, there's no problem.

Anti-competitive would be providing products or services and forcibly leveraging that into an unrelated contract.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#238

Post by pzo »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #209
cityofdelusion wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is the CUDA advantage is gigantic and it has been known for years in GPGPU processing, way before AI was a meme. AMD has lost countless developers over the year just on hello world style projects. Developers had a solid 6-7 years of living with OpenCL when the green rival had a very mature and nice CUDA sitting there. I’ve been out of that world for a while now, but it was truly painful and turned a lot of de…

No, the amount of code written in CUDA for pytorch could easily be rewritten in CUDA for few million or tens of millions of investment. The problem is that it is damn near impossible to get good performance in AMD. For complicated CUDA programs like flash attention(few 100 lines of code), no amount of developers could write those few 100 lines for AMD to get the same performance.

Even worse: GPGPU is not only about LLM or even ML. It's also for computer vision, signal processing, pointcloud processing, e.g. Opencv has backend for CUDA, open3d, PCL the same. Even apple is kind of worse than AMD regarding ecosystem of libraries and open source high performance algorithms - when I tried to port some ICP pipeline to apple metal there was nothing there, most libraries and research code target only CUDA

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#239

Post by swores »

rubatuga wrote: post #210
rib3ye wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVDA P/E ratio 78.70 AMD P/E ratio 263.25 If NVDA is overpriced, AMD is REALLY over-priced.

When you see p/e mentioned in a debate run far away.

I wish people wouldn't post such pointless comments - the only users who get any value from reading your sentence are people who already share your view and can go "hah yeah!", while you couldn't be bothered to explain why it's your view to anyone who doesn't already think the same thing. Literally no benefit over not saying anything. Sorry to be blunt.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#240

Post by nh2 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #202
wsay wrote: 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.

Not always.

One of our machine learning courses was taught in Matlab.

Unsurprisingly, nobody used Matlab after uni, or 5 years later.

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