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Nvidia to Acquire Run:AI
- blackhawkC17 3y agoCan someone explain how or why Israeli startups have historically punched above their weight? For such a small country, they keep churning out tons of successful companies that get acquired by larger American and European counterparts. I’m suspecting high levels of education plus a culture that encourages entrepreneurship and risk-taking, but there might be more to the story..
- tomrod 3y agoMy assumption is all of the above, as well as well connected folks through world class educational institutions, and a generally practical environment.
- TheMrZZ 3y agoI suspect having a 10M population "only" + very bad commercial relations with their direct neighbours make Israeli startups think global from scratch. In Europe, most startups tend to think local-first, which hinders their scaling.
- dagmx 3y agoMandatory military service with a military that has a high weight on technical warfare/superiority is an oft given reason. Another is network effect. The same way that Silicon Valley has a lot of very successful startups. Once you have a few in a region, it creates a knock on effect. It inspires people to follow suite. It means there’s more money being pushed around in that area. It means there’s more people looking at developments in that area. Often someone may be lower down in one successful startup and then leave to make their own with the experience of how to do it.
- shmatt 3y agoI haven't researched deeply but there are plenty of Israeli startup exits with executives coming from combat, non tech units. Usually elite combat units that are harder to get in to. There is something to be said about spending 18-21 in the military, there is pretty much 0 partying during college (that is done during military vacations + the gap year between military and college). By the time you've finished your Bachelors degree you're 25-26 and ready to settle down. You hit your full time job life 6-8 years after high school. Its a very different mindset I look at the 22 year olds moving to NYC after college for their first job, and there is such a huge difference in what they're looking for in their day to day lives. Their job is probably the last thing they are about
- John23832 3y agoThrough the Israeli military service there is a large pipeline of (technical acumen cultivated while serving) -> (business || academia). Especially in technology. A large part of this is comes from the fact that Israel strives to be self sufficient when it comes to military technology. When it comes to deals, there is also, frankly, a large Jewish funding/investing community. The hard part of getting deals is who you know.
- shmatt 3y agoThere is also a work culture of both putting in as many hours as necessary, but also very goal oriented and understanding whats critical to deliver and what sint There are obviously many more countries that make the average American or European tech worker seem lazy, but for some of them working a 60-80 hour week is about showing you're working rather than doing important work From my experience its not strictly the hours put in per week driving Israeli startups, but actually delivering what customers are asking for. I've been in many calls where the executives promised a complex feature that hasn't even been planned yet be delivered very soon, and somehow the team is able to complete it with careful planning and prioritizing (and putting in the hours) The executives dont shy away from the grind either, im now on the other side (US corporate) and Israeli startup CEO/CTOs are basically available for every concern I have 24/7, even when I dont expect them to answer they do
- okdood64 3y ago+1 In my previous stint, I had worked with Spot (https://spot.io/ https://spot.io/) as one of our vendors. Absolutely great product, amazing customer support and ability to take feature requests, or otherwise address our pain points quickly and effectively.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago> even when I dont expect them to answer they do I have also experienced this. Given Israel is the opposite side of the world from California, mainly I expect if I ask a question in the afternoon there will be an answer ready in the morning. But surprisingly often, they answer immediately.
- treprinum 3y agoEasy access to large VC companies in the US, networking effects.
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- trashtester 3y agoThe same demographic is punching even more above their weight in the US. Probably by a pretty large margin, too.
- j7ake 3y agoIt’s not only start ups, but also academia. Weizmann institute of science is the envy of the world in terms of their research output, and widely used as a model for new research institutes to aspire to.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoIf you google "Unit 8200" that is pretty much the reason. The Israeli military pushes their super-smart kids together to be computer scientists and hackers for 2 years - this is essentially the NSA of Israel. Behind every Israeli tech company is a small cadre of unit 8200 grads. When they finish, a huge network of Unit 8200 alumni who are already rich have a shared experience with these kids, and are ready to invest in any idea these kids have. They have a tight-knit group of incredibly smart colleagues as well, from their time in the military.
- yoavm 3y ago> Behind every Israeli tech company is a small cadre of unit 8200 grads. This is of course greatly exaggerated. I know plenty of Israeli startups that never had 8200 grads in them, mine included. I actually think that the role of a specific army unit in creating the environment that fosters these startups is really hyped. It's much more of a cultural thing than some random army unit.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoPlenty of communities have cultures of entrepreneurship and hard work, though.
- flakeoil 3y agoOverall military spending can explain a lot as well. A lot of military spending goes to existing companies as well as startups to develop weapons and defence systems which drives innovation in high-tech technology. Israel spends 5.3% of their GDP on military. That's more than almost any other country in the world and they have spent a lot for many decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest_military_expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...
- jolj 3y agoI don't think the Israeli defense budget really goes into Israeli startups. The only related fields are drone startups and cyber startups that hardly sell domestically
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago> I’m suspecting high levels of education plus a culture that encourages entrepreneurship and risk-taking, but there might be more to the story.. I sincerely hope this is bait, because the answer is obvious.
- I_ 3y agoWhich is? (I am genuinely asking)
- throw310822 3y agoJews have a higher proportion of very smart people than other ethnicities. It's something that is "complicated" to talk about (we don't like all the implications of such a possibility), but it's pretty much indisputable.
- N0b8ez 3y agoHitler infamously condemned the IQ system for being "jewish". I don't think that sentiment has gone away.
- trashtester 3y agoUsually it's the far left that use the oppressor/oppressed way of thinking to demonize their enemies. But when it comes to Jews, Nazis and many other extreme right wingers do the same. Hitler saw the Jews as an existential threat, not as objectively inferior to "Aryans". In fact, this is why he hated them so much above anyone else; he thought that they were the only "Race" that had the potential to out-compete his "Aryans".
- throw310822 3y ago> Hitler saw the Jews ... not as objectively inferior to "Aryans". ... he thought that they were the only "Race" that had the potential to out-compete his "Aryans" We're veering terribly off topic, but I'm pretty sure this is not historically true.
- underdeserver 3y agoThere's "Startup Nation" by Senor and Singer with a thesis on this. My personal opinion is huge talent density, a just-get-it-done attitude, strong network effects from military service and a small number of universities, and a lot of startup experience across the board - if you're an entrepreneur in Tel Aviv, it's relatively easy to find people who've done it before multiple times, and they'll give you good advice.
- htrp 3y agoIsrael is also small enough that almost everyone is 1-2 degrees away from a top tier vc
- CSMastermind 3y agoThis touches on some potentially sensitive topics but at least some of the success is explained by having a population with, on average, the second highest IQs. Another part of it is definitely the benefits from having a strong high-trust culture that gives them access to social networks and a priority to provide for the group as a whole not just their own personal interests.
- trashtester 3y agoIf we look at IQ as an explanation, it's not only about the mean, but also about the variance, which is driven up by the Ashkenazi sub-population. I would not be surprised if Israel has a significantly larger percentage of people with IQ>140 than any other nation.
- myth_drannon 3y agoThere is a very large percentage of population that doesn't participate in the economy and is largely uneducated. So it's even more shocking to see Israel so successful. And of course, you have the huge wave of immigration from the former USSR in the 90's. Sadly I'm very pessimistic about the future of Israel and the demographics are against it.
- jolj 3y agoThe demographics are against the entire western world however i wouldn't get too caught up with extrapolations, they are usually wrong (see population bomb)
- m3kw9 3y agoThe govt is westernized and allow relatively more freedom of thought than other nations. So the situation is similar to America. Plus Israel is always been focused on tech because they know they need leverage to defend itself as a small country surrounded by adversaries
- belter 3y agoNvidia has R&D operations in Israel for several years. Are any of the employees from Run:AI ex-NVIDIA?
- 0xcde4c3db 3y agoI'm no economic historian and don't know where the relevant figures would be for Israel, but having skimmed some history of South Korea and Taiwan I get the impression that when a small country overperforms like this it usually involves a combination of generous domestic subsidies/incentives and a massive influx of foreign capital, which can come in numerous forms including technology transfer. Having a diaspora in more developed countries probably doesn't hurt a country's chances either (see e.g. Morris Chang).
- trashtester 3y agoThe thing is, Jews tend to overperform even more outside of Israel. From Wikipedia: Of the 965 individual recipients of the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences between 1901 and 2023,[1] at least 214 have been Jews or people with at least one Jewish parent, representing 22% of all recipients. For comparison, 65.4% of Nobel prize winners were either Christians or had a Christian background. Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world's population, meaning their share of winners is 110 times their proportion of the world's population. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates
- VS1999 3y agoUnless they're somehow 110 times better than everyone else, this indicates some powerful nepotism.
- trashtester 3y agoThat's the oppressor/oppressed narrative for any such difference. Hitler came to the same conclusion, and decided to do something about it. Various communists revolutionaries have used the same kind of thinking to get rid of the ruling classes in their countries after the revolution. But if you consider it this way: The Nobel price was given mostly to white people (including Jews) until about 1970. That's a factor of 10 already. Then you consider that Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of about 115 vs other Europeans somewhere south of 100 on average. If the standard deviation is a constant 15, a population with a mean of 100 has about 0.4% of the population with an IQ >140. Increase the mean to 115, and that grows to about 5%. That's another factor of 10. And the gap widens as the threshold increases. This seems to fit the 110x almost perfectly. Disclaimer: I have no Jewish ancestry that I'm aware of. Edit: Also, to my knowledge, the Nobel committee has NOT been dominated by Jews.
- phone8675309 3y agoWhen you've got the US fueling your war machine you tend to have a lot of money left over to plow into tech dominance.
- maratc 3y ago“Start up nation” does a good job exploring this topic. In short, it’s about never accepting authority and challenging everything, the roots for that come from the culture and even the religion.
- xyzzy4747 3y agoThis may be controversial to some people here, but Israelis have high IQs genetically and from good parenting. When you put a bunch of determined high IQ people together they're going to outperform.
- xyst 3y agoInvestment into their people. Proper support structures. Taking advantage of their “country pride”. Same effect was seen in USA during the space race. At some point USA just “gave up” and ceded all control to private corporations which don’t give a shit about the people and only care about the bottom line
- alephnerd 3y ago> I’m suspecting high levels of education It's this plus being a small country. The entire population of Israel is roughly the same as the Bay Area, so everyone is 2-3 degrees away from each other. This makes it easier to raise capital and build a startup. The success of Checkpoint and PANW kickstarted the scene.
- jampekka 3y agoProbably a lot of money sloshing around the US-subsidized military-industrial complex?
- ActorNightly 3y agoThe boring answer is that its simple community. If you surround yourself by friends who all do that one thing and are all driven to be good at that thing, you will be motivated to do the same thing and get good at it, and motivate other people in turn. Silicon Valley used to be like this.
- rchaud 3y ago> I’m suspecting high levels of education plus a culture that encourages entrepreneurship and risk-taking There's also the small matter of $200bn in US military assistance since 1973, which involved significant knowledge transfer across many different scientific and engineering domains.
- someotherperson 3y agoI've worked for two, both inside and outside Israel, and both were very successful. The same thing happened both times. 1. Foreign Jewish VCs pumped money into it, gave the founders plenty of autonomy. 2. The internal network of the founders to other successful Jews was gigantic. Even if they're unimpressive themselves. Essentially easy access to capital + domestic and international network that can facilitate success. It's a nationalized version of YC.
- gk1 3y agoThis announcement doesn't mention a price, but the scoop by Calcalist last week says "many hundreds of millions of dollars and could even reach $1 billion." Good for them. (https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rkmbe9e0p https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rkmbe9e0p)
- cheselnut 3y agoTechcrunch mentioned it was $700M
- jmsflknr 3y agoCalcalist says the deal is valued at [$700 million](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/s1w2iniwa https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/s1w2iniwa).
- papichulo2023 3y agoI was under the impresion that modern AI still runs mainly baremetal. Isn't pytorch parallel distribute not good enough?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- htrp 3y agoThere are a ton of tricks you can do to share hbm/flops amongst GPUs in a cluster.
- chuckadams 3y agoYou can use kubernetes to manage bare metal machines, but it probably doesn't make much difference: once the bits are on the GPU, I doubt a properly configured VM is getting in the way, let alone containerd.
- jfkfif 3y agothe problem is multinode runs that communicate through the network
- josh-sematic 3y agoYes, which is especially important for training. Getting good GPU interconnect can be really important for training large models.
- freeone3000 3y agoMultinode runs don’t communicate through the network in a DGX configuration. NVlink allows for RDMA over direct infiniband. No need for network here.
- tomoyoirl 3y agoInfiniband is a network too… But even if we set that aside you’ll get access to your data over a network connection because these are expensive nodes running batch jobs with finite disk space, not personal workstations.
- htrp 3y ago> Run:ai has developed an orchestration and virtualization software layer tailored to the unique needs of AI workloads running on GPUs and similar chipsets. Run:ai’s Kubernetes-based container platform for AI clouds efficiently pools and shares GPUs by automatically assigning the necessary amount of computing power – from fractions of GPUs, to multiple GPUs, to multiple nodes of GPUs. Basically Nvidia coming out with managed AI services on DGX cloud
- belter 3y agoApparently the DGX cloud is hosted first on Oracle, moving to Azure and hosting on Google soon... From 2023: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-launches-dgx-cloud-giving-every-enterprise-instant-access-to-ai-supercomputer-from-a-browser https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-launches-dgx-cloud... "NVIDIA is partnering with leading cloud service providers to host DGX Cloud infrastructure, starting with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Its OCI Supercluster provides a purpose-built RDMA network, bare-metal compute and high-performance local and block storage that can scale to superclusters of over 32,000 GPUs. Microsoft Azure is expected to begin hosting DGX Cloud next quarter, and the service will soon expand to Google Cloud and more."
- spicyusername 3y agoThere are also self-hosted DGX Grace Blackwell systems releasing later this year / next year.
- htrp 3y agoDGX cloud is nvidia's cloud offering (you can think of it like a snowflake/databricks in that it runs on top of other clouds), with allegedly the reference design architectures vs someone just slapping some H100s in a server rack.
- sa-code 3y agoRun ai is not a mature product at this point though.
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- freedomben 3y agoI suppose we're now entering the era where Nvidia is so big and wealthy that they will join the other kings (e.g. FAANG+) in being acquisition machines. The contemporary regulatory environment may make this an interesting thing to watch. I suspect that they'll (by that I mean most tech companies) have to get these acquisitions done earlier while the companies are even smaller if they are to get past regulators.
- imachine1980_ 3y agoi doubt NVIDIA main business have lots of differences, and this acquisition make sense both as add on for their product ecosystems (lock in) or too trying to pivot too cloud base solution.
- ethbr1 3y agoNvidia's footprint is more specific and obtuse than the other FAANG+s, so I expect they'll have an easier time with acquisition regulatory approval on the edges of their business model. If they wanted to acquire an ML chip company, sure, but I/P/SaaS value adds will probably sail through.
- linearrust 3y agoWe are well into that era already. Nvidia tried to buy ARM from softbank but was blocked by regulators a few years ago. It's amazing that a company known for video game graphics cards is now a $2 trillion company. Nvidia's market cap ( over 2 trillion ) is the 2nd biggest of the FAANG+. It's bigger than Google. It's bigger than Amazon. Only Apple has a bigger market cap. And most of nvidia's market cap gains has been in the past year. It's unique for being the only predominantly hardware company of the group.
- twoodfin 3y agoI think Nvidia would argue their software is at least as valuable to their market position as Apple's is.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoMicrosoft is missing from your list. And if Nvidia is predominantly hardware, so is Apple.
- m3kw9 3y agoThis co facilitates efficient allocation of GPUs. I can almost say it’s like a hyper convergence service like Nutanix.
- nightski 3y agoI am so tired of all these acquisitions. My personal opinion is that it is ruining our economy.
- jahewson 3y agoCare to explain how?
- JohnFen 3y agoBy reducing competition and diversity. Such acquisitions also often (but not always) results in the worsening of the products/services that the acquired company produces. It's pretty difficult to come up with examples of acquisitions or mergers that resulted in something positive for the market and society at large.
- smallmancontrov 3y agoM&A people specialize in making excuses as to why their merger will definitely be something positive that benefits the market and society at large. Of course, time usually proves them wrong and nobody is ever held accountable, but don't underestimate them, they are good at this.
- jahewson 2y agoSurely Nvidia buying a company in the space increases competition? They have sizeable resources to throw behind their new company. The number of players in the space is the same today as it was yesterday. Remember that many startups are heading towards failure and an acquisition is a soft landing. As for M&A being universally bad, I’m not sure where to start with that? I don’t think there’s a single notable company in existence that hasn’t made successful acquisitions. The economic benefits of Shell have surely been greater since they moved on from the seashell importing business. Apple created much value with their purchase of failing NeXT.
- xyst 3y agoyup. And most of these acquisitions end up just sitting on a shelf so the company can hoard the IP rights. So nvidia can rest assured that nobody will touch them, or at least impede their progress significantly.
- cheselnut 3y agoNVIDIA's vertically integrating their platform and making it the single place for your AI infra needs - pretty cool
- Hrun0 3y agoI don't share your enthusiasm for monopolies
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- xyst 3y ago[flagged]