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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
- karlzt 2y agoI wonder why it is 665 instead of 666?
- dst_ 2y agoI’m quite surprised about this acquisition (and it’s scale) for a few reasons: 1. It’s a consulting firm and not a product shop, so you’re only paying for people, although they’ve from the start tried really hard to brand themselves as a startup. 2. They’ve been training an LLM, but mainly with tax payer money using a government super computer (that uses AMD chips), which is arguably their only product, but completely open source. 3. Some of the founders are well-connected in Finland which has given them a seat (and visibility) in goverment initiatives, but this is mainly BS. 4. They have the least rigorous hiring process I’ve ever witnessed. I remember checking them out in 2018 when I was looking into switching companies. Back then when I checked their folks on LinkedIn, the prior experience in AI most of their people had was taking a few Coursera courses. Later they called me and asked me about joining and I’ve never had an interview where no one asked anything technical beyond what I’ve worked on. I also hope employees get something out of this, because their offer was a revenue share on billed hours and no mention of equity. However, my understanding is that they had a large investment from private equity (Altor), so the mission was to make the PE company money and not the employees. They’ve allowed part-time offers where you still keep working at a university, so I assume this has been quite interesting for many researchers, i.e. you get paid some on top of the crappy university pay and you also get to see real problems that companies have.
- helsinkiandrew 2y agohttps://archive.ph/33O61 https://archive.ph/33O61
- _flux 2y agoNice to see AMD finally doing something about competing in the compute market (LLM being the hottest thing at the moment)! Though apparently MI300X is a fine product as well. But it still needs code.
- moffkalast 2y agoIf they spent the 665M on improving ROCm instead they'd get a hell lot more return on it.
- SSLy 2y agoMy 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?
- csomar 2y agoSure, buying this company for 600m will fix everything.
- sqeaky 2y agoThat is the most sarcastic thing I have read in weeks. But isn't getting a software stack the exact kind of thing they need? Is there no overlap in the skills at the purchased company and the skills needed to make the AMD software stack not suck?
- eysgshsvsvsv 2y agoYou all live in a simple world where complex systems are fixed in simple statements like software stack is all they need.
- sqeaky 2y agoWhy the personal attack? I said that I interpreted the previous comment as sarcastic so I could be called out if it wasn't. The author hasn't yet disagreed. And I think sarcasm is warranted in a space that has witnessed so many bad acquisitions. On software at AMD; if my world is so simple, please explain where I am wrong. I never said this was a simple solution, I implied there was some overlap needed skills. ROCm sucks, it has licensing and apparently use issues. It has had performance issues, and that is getting better. It isn't in a lot of the places it needs to be where it could be considered a default choice. Apparently, Silo uses AMD stuff to do ML work. Apparently, they have domain experts in this space. It seems likely that getting input from such people could positively influence the ML and hardware. Of course there will be complexity in this process. This is a 600 million dollar deal involving thousands of people (not just Silo employee, but AMD people, regulators, stakeholders, etc). I don't think anyone is implying this is simple. I only wanted to say, "This isn't obviously dumb".
- woadwarrior01 2y agoLooks like a consulting company[1] at first glance. Also, empty HuggingFace account[2]. [1]: https://www.silo.ai/ https://www.silo.ai/ [2]: https://huggingface.co/SiloAI https://huggingface.co/SiloAI
- anewhnaccount2 2y agoThe models are here: https://huggingface.co/LumiOpen https://huggingface.co/LumiOpen
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoWho is downvoting this? You are correct. Silo.AI is a consulting company with an LLM side hustle. This acquisition is weird.
- m3kw9 2y agoLooks like they have expertise in using AMD gpus to train LLMs and will be tasked to catch up to cuda
- high_na_euv 2y agoWhat are they going to give AMD that they are priced this high?
- thenaturalist 2y agoExpert talent and prob some in house tech. Mainly talent I guess which they can put to accelerating Triton development, their alternative to CUDA.
- duxup 2y agoDoes the desirable talent in this case have equity / future vesting equity that is a part of the price? I just wonder as many decades ago I was a part of a company who wanted to get into a market, they bought a little start up, and over the course of a year everyone quit, and the project eventually folded entirely ;) It was sorta hilarious, but also bizarre that the acquiring company didn't think of that.
- thenaturalist 2y agoI mean buying a "private AI lab" doesn't sound to me like they have the purchase price worth in IP which is so desirable nobody else has unlocked it and it lends itself particularly well to being integrated with AMD tech? Let's see if more details come to light, but a good part of that price is spent for sure on people. It'd be hilarious indeed if they wouldn't be able to or haven't properly incentivized them to retain them.
- stanleykm 2y agoDid you mean ROCm? afaik Triton is a python framework that sits on top of CUDA and ROCm.
- thenaturalist 2y agoHuge congratulations to the founders and what a nice mark for the European (and Nordirc) startup community. It's gonna be quite interesting to see if this works out strategically. I guess the bet is an in-house army of PhDs vs. having a CUDA - which you don't as a second mover here - and assuming PhDs tightly coupled with the hardware can outperform an open framework/ push Triton to parity to CUDA over time.
- sva_ 2y agoCongrats to the founders indeed, but > what a nice mark for the European (and Nordirc) startup community. Not sure if it is a great win for the EU at large if their AI startups get bought up by American companies though, to be fair.
- thenaturalist 2y agoThe 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, senior staff/ founders with previous exits reinvested their earnings into the domestic startup scene through founding again or becoming Business Angels or going VC. I see this as a huge net win. * EDIT: For integrating with compute, I guess.
- 627467 2y agoActually, 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 is more efficient and I doubt it will be (meaningfully) in europe
- hi 2y agoAnyone know a timeline for AMD on MLPerf?
- latchkey 2y agoIt won't be for a while. It really takes someone to focus on this and it isn't just AMD. The team at MLPerf will need to step in as well and from my discussions with them, they are busy enough as it is with their own goals. My company, Hot Aisle, has a box of mi300x (soon to be +16 more) that we have dedicated as a free resource to unbiased benchmarking. That's instigated articles like the Chips & Cheese one and the Nscale Elio post... https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/06/25/testing-amds-giant-mi300x/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/06/25/testing-amds-giant-mi3... https://www.nscale.com/blog/nscale-benchmarks-amd-mi300x-gpus-with-gemm-tuning-improves-throughput-and-latency-by-up-to-7-2x https://www.nscale.com/blog/nscale-benchmarks-amd-mi300x-gpu...
- georgehotz 2y agoAMD is already on MLPerf in the form of the tinybox red :)
- Aaronstotle 2y agoThis and the MI300x makes me hopeful for AMD
- latchkey 2y agoIt really is a fantastic piece of hardware. We just need the software to catch up.
- dotnet00 2y agoWhich tbf has been an apt description of AMD GPUs for the better part of a decade. Great hardware, god awful software and even worse long term software strategy. It's why the 'fine wine' spin on the long term performance of AMD GPUs exists in gaming circles.
- latchkey 2y agoYou're totally right. That said, spending $665m on an AI company seems, at first glance, like a step in the right direction. I'm sure there are a 1000 ways they could have spent that much money, but hey... I do appreciate them at least trying to do something to resolve the issue. Another way to think of it is that now there is a whole team that isn't dedicated to nvidia.
- dotnet00 2y agoYeah I'm not arguing against this acquisition, just commenting on how things have been so far. At this point I'm kind of apathetic, it's good if whatever they do eventually leads them to fixing their software woes, and I'll come back to their stuff then. If not, I'm fine with sticking to CUDA for now. Ultimately they're all GPU programming languages, once you're good with one, switching to another one is not that hard (as long as the supporting software is good of course).
- Workaccount2 2y agoImagine AMD simply put that $665M into tooling and driver development. The stock probably would have doubled.
- thenaturalist 2y agoWhat's the difference to what they did in this acquisition? Who's gonna improve tooling and develop drivers? PhD level AI experts such as employed by Silo AI, probably, right? EDIT: For context [0], Nvidia invested billions into CUDA development way back when it was unsexy. Clearly a second mover won't need that much, Nvidia proved the market. But a billion doesn't seem like a large sum for the potential upside of AMD catching a significantly larger share of the budget going into AI - many times the value of this acquisition. 0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-huangs-nvidia-is-powering-the-ai-revolution https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-hua...
- Workaccount2 2y agoPerhaps their goal is to develop an LLM and then prompt it to fix ROCm.
- duxup 2y agoI 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.
- short_sells_poo 2y agoYou 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.
- duxup 2y ago
- daghamm 2y agoSince FT is paywalled and the press release link from Silo is currently pointig to nowhere: https://www.silo.ai/blog/amd-to-acquire-silo-ai-to-expand-enterprise-ai-solutions-globally https://www.silo.ai/blog/amd-to-acquire-silo-ai-to-expand-en... I've no idea what is going on. This is 5 times bigger than their combined AI acquisitions in the last 12 months. The only link between Silo and AMD is that Silo has been using an AMD accelerator cluster for training.
- cooper_ganglia 2y agoI honestly don't understand how paywalled links get so much traction, most people probably can't even engage with the material. Thanks for the direct link to Silo AI's press release!
- thenaturalist 2y agoSee @helsinkiandrews comment, he posted the de-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/33O61 https://archive.ph/33O61
- idunnoman1222 2y agoBecause everyone knows how to use archive.org
- YinLuck- 2y ago[dead]
- mastax 2y agoI’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 mind for this acquisition but I could see there being a lot of value having an in house LLM team to create models for customers to build on, run in benchmarks, and improve their products.
- eightysixfour 2y agoYes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software that induces demand for their GPUs.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoThe biggest frameworks are still from other players though. Pytorch, tensorflow and jax aren't funded by Nvidia.
- stanleykm 2y agoBut they are built on top of nvidia tooling and you can use nvidia tools to do more extensive profiling than other players offer.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoTrue, gotta love Nsight Systems and Compute. 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.
- Conscat 2y agoIs Omniperf/Omnitrace not very good? I haven't used it, but I have been using Nsight Systems recently and it looks comparable to me at a glance.
- jacobgorm 2y agoThis happened after Silo trained an LLM on the AMD-powered LUMI supercomputer.
- petesergeant 2y agoSeems 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
- jacobgorm 2y agoExcept the EU paid for the hardware https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/supercomputers/our-supercomputers_en https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/supercomputers/our-supercompute...
- Pandabob 2y agoCame here to point this out. Silo never had to invest huge amounts on GPUs. A shrewd move by the founders.
- rubatuga 2y agoThere is debate about public investment into private ventures, but in this case it may provide long term benefits to Finland
- petesergeant 2y agoEven better!
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoWhere in that source does it claim that Silo didn't have to pay to use the hardware?
- jacobgorm 2y ago
- littlecranky67 2y agoI've been thinking that NVDA stock is massively overpriced - yes, AI is a hot topic, but their only advantage is the software stack. It is just a matter of time until Intel and AMD realize that they should join hands and do an open-source CUDA alternative for their respecitve GPUs (yes, Intel has competetive GPUs and just like AMD and Nvidia they will try to get a share of the AI chip market share).
- airstrike 2y ago"just" a matter of time... If it were that easy, it would have already been done, or so they say. Also don't forget network effects
- wmf 2y agoThey've been working on that for years.
- dylan604 2y agoYeah? And? So? As if CUDA was developed overnight and never worked on again. Such a weak comment
- zokier 2y agoAMD has been working on GPGPU at least as long as nVidia. AMDs "CTM" SDK was released in 2006, same year as CUDA. In 2007 they released Stream SDK. Then they had "APP SDK" for a while, which iirc coincided with their opencl phase. And now they landed on rocm. Meanwhile nvidia has kept trucking with just CUDA.
- RyanShook 2y ago2024 YTD returns: NVDA 172% AMD 27% INTC -30%
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- airstrike 2y agoFree Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amd-acquire-finnish-startup-silo-ai-665-mln-step-up-ai-race-2024-07-10/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amd-acquire-finnish-st... Joint AMD / Silo AI press release: https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1206/amd-to-acquire-silo-ai-to-expand-enterprise-ai-solutions https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1206/am...
- pavlov 2y agoThe economic mood in Finland is downright depressed [1]. This kind of news is therefore extremely welcome because it indicates there's a way forward, out of the old industry doldrums where people are still moaning about closed paper mills and Nokia's failure 15 years ago. $665M USD isn't a staggering number by Silicon Valley standards, but it's very significant for a nation of five million people that hasn't seen global startup successes like neighboring Sweden with Spotify and others. [1] The actual level of depression is somewhat hard to track because Finns are always pessimistic regardless of how well they're doing. (This also makes them the happiest people on Earth in polls. The situation right now is never quite as bad as one had expected beforehand, so when a pollster calls to ask, the conclusion must be that they're pretty happy with things overall at that specific moment, but surely everything is going in the wrong direction anyway.)
- SebaSeba 2y agoContrary 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.
- pavlov 2y agoThese 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 revenue just aren’t unicorns anymore, unless they happen to be AI.
- SebaSeba 2y agoBoth Supercell and Wolt have their headquarters steadily in Finland. The founders and Finnish early investors have gained hundreds of millions or billions of euros wealth for themselves which they have further spended and invested in Finland. They have paid huge amounts of taxes and keep on doing all of these since they are still located in Finland. It's hard to downplay the value of those IMO. Overall Rovio wasn't a complete disaster either. First made billions of euros for many years and was later sold to Sega for >$700 million. Still has HQ in Finland. There's plenty of interesting and fast growing startups still left here. For example Supermetrics, Varjo, Smartly, Iceye, Aiven to name a few. IMO you are being pessimistic.
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoHappy to see this acquisition landing in Finland, but I have to wonder how the purchase price is justified. Silo AI is primarily a consulting company doing "traditional" kinds of AI consulting projects. Their LLM project is like a side hustle for the company.
- nicce 2y agoPersonally, I am bit sad that nothing stays in Finland. Too many promising companies have been sold into foreign countries recently. Just because founders look for exit strategy (not claiming that it is the case here). Not good for Finland in general.
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoWell, in this case the purchase price appears grossly overpriced. So even though Finland lost an AI startup, it gained money that is worth more than the startup. That money will to a large extent flow back into the Finnish economy in the form of taxes, investment in new startups, etc.
- nicce 2y ago> That money will to a large extent flow back into the Finnish economy in the form of taxes, investment in new startups, etc. Short term gains, in terms of taxes. Otherwise, there are no guarantees for that. Shareholders might just make some castle. Who knows. Or move away to different country.
- thenaturalist 2y ago> Shareholders might just make some castle. And then be left with nothing? Look at Silo's About page. The people who started this are not slackers or already had so much money before that they could have bought a 3rd Porsche. Do you think these people will pull back and do nothing as their ability to benefit from and shape the technological advances happening just increases with this exit? I highly doubt that. > Or move away to different country. And then? Capital is global. And as per these [0] statistics, Finland is ranked 4th for per capita VC money invested in 2018, far ahead of France and Germany. As per this [1] article from May, Finland received the most private equity and VC investment adjusted for GDP in all of Europe in 2023. Finland is an attractive country to invest in, and I highly doubt native speakers with an excellent local network - i.e. much more expertise than the average non-Finnish speaking invesotor - will not be aware of that and capitalize on it. [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/879124/venture-capital-as-share-of-gdp/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/879124/venture-capital-a... [1]: https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/en/articles/breaking-news/2024/private-equity-2023/ https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/en/articles/breaking-news/20...
- lopkeny12ko 2y agoWow. I hope this is blocked by the DoJ on antitrust grounds.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- duxup 2y agoArguably as far as anti trust grounds go wouldn't AMD being a more viable competitor in the AI space be ... good?
- wantsanagent 2y agoI'm curious how this deal happened. There are a lot of LLM shops out there, how did this nordic co get the attention of AMD and why did they think this co stood out among the crowd.
- hmaxwell 2y agoThis is a nothing burger compared to amazon and google giving $4b and $2b respectively to Anthropic
- uptownfunk 2y agoSmells fishy anti trust
- bot0047 2y agoIf nVidia is IBM then AMD could be the next Microsoft.
- mindcrime 2y agoI 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 investing that money in their existing software team(s)? Or spinning up (a) new team(s) from scatch? Who's to say. But at least it show some intention on their behalf to beef up their software stance, and generally speaking that feels like a positive step to me. But then again, I'm an AMD fan boi who is invested in the ROCm ecosystem, so I'm not entirely unbiased. But I think the overall point stands, regardless of that.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoAMD 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.
- viewtransform 2y agoLook 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) .
- getcrunk 2y agoI’m still pissed they finally brought rocm support to their Gpgus on windows starting with the 6800xt … I have the 6700xt
- yoouareperfect 2y agoIf AMD and Intel team up on soft to replace CUDA, then I'm selling all my NVDA stock and even shorting it short term
- machinekob 2y agoThey tried SYCL and no one is using it
- ColonelPhantom 2y agoSYCL 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.
- trhway 2y ago$2M/head. That is a steal, even by European standards. "In July 2024, Silo AI has 300+ employees out of which 125+ hold a PhD degree."
- samuell 2y agoForbes has a free-to-read article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2024/07/10/amd-to-acquire-silo-ai-to-accelerate-the-companys-ai-ambitions/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2024/07/10/amd-...
- non-e-moose 2y agoFormer AMD employee here (2007-2012) AMD 'dropped the ball' BADLY when (2012) then-VP Ben Bar-Haim decided to do a software purge, and focused on retaining the over-bureaucratic folks of ATI/Markham. Net result: NVidia was (and did) pick up a lot of very smart researchers and developers from AMD (I know of a couple whom were thoroughly disgusted with AMD management at that time) He also trashed a lot of good and useful software projects for seemingly protectionist reasons (if it wasn't ATI/Markham, it was dumped)
- glzone1 2y agoWasn't there a point at which AMD was actually looking at buying nvidia but Jensen wanted to be something like CEO. Jensen actually worked at AMD so there was already a connection there. Instead AMD bought ATI which if I remember was barely hanging on. Not saying it was a bad purchase, just interesting that a bet on ATI (always had buggy drivers in my experience) which hadn't really demonstrated success ... how decisions ripple for a while.
- JonChesterfield 2y agoInteresting context, thank you.
- vegabook 2y agoThis is an indictment of Lisa Su's own ROCm strategy. An implicit admission of failure, without explicitly admitting it. I predict this acquisition will cause even more software schizophreny inside AMD as multiple conflicting teams pinball their way around towards nowhere in particular.
- lostmsu 2y agoI have to agree. I doubt AI architects that use high-level libraries are going to fix AMD's bottom line. Only maybe as a marketing ploy for future sales.
- nashashmi 2y agoAmd once bought an ARM server manufacturer. It went down the tubes. I don’t think this will work either.
- jenny2244 2y ago[flagged]
- hiddencost 2y agoThis seems like a pure acquire, and not at a good price? $2M/head with a four year lock in isn't great.
- rasz 2y agoWill work just as great as $1.9B USD Pensando acquisition, or $334m SeaMicro.
- rreichman 2y agoWas Pensando a bad acquisition? Isn't it a bit early to tell?