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My 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 fa
by SSLy 2y ago
My 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".
- mindcrime 2y agoI'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?
- sqeaky 2y agoIt 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.
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- baobabKoodaa 2y agoSure, there is some overlap. Is that overlap worth 665M?
- rvnx 2y agoYes, it brought instantly (at least partially) +12B USD on the valuation of AMD. This shows to investors that AMD is still in the race.
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoYeah I saw the stock market uptick, but that is a kneejerk reaction by the public markets. It's not as if the public market participants have had ample time to evaluate the merits of the acquisition, and even then, if they are right or not.
- szundi 2y agoAnyway, it seems market thinks this is a 20x value acquisition.
- drexlspivey 2y agoYou shouldn't attribute that on the acquisition. The stock went 3.8% up today but also 4% up on monday, 4.8% up last Friday 4.2% up last Tuesday etc.
- sqeaky 2y agoGoing straight by stock price isn't very valuable unless you're selling immediately. 600 million dollars is a lot, and in order for that 12 billion increase to stick around this team up needs to present a lot of value. I'm optimistic but I'm also an outsider.
- lyu07282 2y agoThat assumes that the reason AMD's software stack sucks is because of skill, not company culture, management or other reasons that won't change with this acquisition.
- throwway120385 2y agoIf it's a culture problem and the C-suite is aware of it, then one reason to buy a company with a working software stack is to percolate their culture into your company so you can be successful.
- szundi 2y agoHopefully the ceo of the acquired company gets a director role in AMD then at least, not subordinated a supposedly subpar cultured director already in AMD
- aardvarkr 2y agoI have a friend working there and it's a bunch of old curmudgeons stuck in their way. Good luck changing culture with a single acquisition
- throwway120385 2y agoThe company I used to work for is doing this to the engineering org in my current employer. It requires the leadership from the old company to be embedded in very senior positions, and it requires buy-in from the existing C-suite. There's a lot of backroom politics to change culture along with a bunch of work to prove yourselves to people who aren't involved in the backroom. There have been a bunch of points at which I didn't think it would continue but so far the original team has been pretty successful at rising. Think of it as a reverse McDonnell-Douglas.
- imtringued 2y agoI also have this impression. The software problems that are plaguing AMD are in the "less than $10 million" range, if they hired the right people to work on the most severe bugs in their GPU drivers and let them do their job.
- anonym29 2y ago"fix"? What is there to fix? AMD has been simultaneously fighting Intel and Nvidia, two MUCH larger companies, and it's been winning the fight against Intel for close to a decade now. It's certainly not Lisa Su's fault that the clowns over at Intel got stuck on variations of 14nm (with clever marketing names like 14nm+++++) for nearly a decade, but credit certainly is hers for introducing Zen and putting AMD back on top of the x86 market. With the new x870(e) motherboards and Granite Ridge chips right around the corner, effortlessly destroying the pyrotechnic processing units known as Raptor Lake, it's honestly a miracle to me that Intel's stock price is still as high as it is. Guess wall street still loves those billions of forcefully confiscated taxpayer dollars being doled out by Uncle Sam to a graying dinosaur like Intel who couldn't even compete without those handouts... the quality of their marketplace offerings certainly isn't what's keeping that valuation up!
- philistine 2y agoI’m also bullish on Intel, but clearly not as much as you. Intel is transitioning right now. x86 is never going to reclaim the crown of most important architecture, so Intel is trying its best to become a foundry for all the fabless customers out there. It’s going to take a long while, but right now they’re the best company to compete with TSMC in ten years. If Apple uses their foundries next decade, you’ll know Intel is back on top.
- throwaway2037 2y ago> x86 is never going to reclaim the crown of most important architecture To be clear, I assume you are including 32-bit and 64-bit, e.g., x86-64. I am surprised by this comment. To me, x86 won the architecture battle because of Linux (and less Microsoft Windows). Nothing is so cheap to deploy and maintain as a Linux server that runs x86-64 procs. Yes, I know you can buy single board computers, but x86 wins in the triangulation of dollars-watts-performance. If you disagree, what do you think is the most important architecture today?
- philistine 2y agoARM. Every second that passes, for each person that is born that will use a computer, at least two people who will never use a computer is born. Those two people will own a phone though, and that phone will have an ARM chip. As time goes on, more and more ARM chips will take roles traditionally taken by x86-64. Hell, ARM is already the best-selling architecture. Laws of scale will dictate that investments in x86-64 will fail to keep pace with ARM. Apple Silicon is already showing a small fragment of that effect. The chips are incredibly competitive, and for what Apple has chosen to focus on (perf-per-watt), unbeatable. ARM investments by other companies are catching up to Apple, and x86-64 does not make enough money to reverse that trend.
- rdtsc 2y agoWhat do you think they should do?
- anewhnaccount2 2y agoThey successfully trained LLMs on Lumi, which has AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs. This perhaps provides a hint about one angle on why AMD are interested.
- zacksiri 2y agoIt makes sense then for AMD to buy them out. If they’ve trained LLMs with lumi which has a lot of instinct GPUs there is a high chance they’ve had to work through and solve a lot of the gaps in software support from AMD. They may have already figured out a lot of stuff and kept it all proprietary and AMD buying them out is a quick way to get access to all the solutions. I suspect AMD is trying to fast track their software stack and this acquisition allows them to do just that.
- rcarmo 2y agoI am curious if the models are any good, though. The landscape is so fragmented I never heard of Poro.
- ghnws 2y agoPoro (reindeer in finnish) is specifically developed to be used in Finnish. GPT etc. general models struggle with less used languages. Unfortunately this sale likely means this development will cease.
- hrududuu 2y agoGpt4 or even 3.5 is quite good at Finnish. Was there ever a benchmark against closed source models?
- rcarmo 2y agoReindeer is a great name, and gives me an idea - next time I create an Azure OpenAI resource (depending on model availability and data residency requirements, sometimes you need to create more than one) I'm going to start going through Santa's reindeer names.
- doikor 2y agoThey have been using/building stuff for the LUMI supercomputer which has a bit over 12000 MI250X 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... “Silo AI has been a pioneer in scaling large language model training on LUMI, Europe’s fastest supercomputer powered by over 12,000 AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs,”
- btown 2y agoThe underinvestment in, and abandonment of, a project for a CUDA compatibility layer https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA?tab=readme-ov-file#faq https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA?tab=readme-ov-file#faq by AMD a few months ago hints that they no longer see CUDA compatibility as a goal. Perhaps they see Silo as a way to jumpstart bringing ROCm to parity with CUDA's toolkit. It's hard to understand if there's an underlying strategy to how they'll stay relevant from a software perspective when they're abandoning projects like this. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39344815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39344815
- seunosewa 2y agoThat's an unfortunate choice. AMD has excelled in making compatible hardware. Not so much software success, if any.
- Narhem 2y agoIt takes a lot of design skill to make something complex simple. I have a lot of doubt AMDs department even has design skills.
- Narhem 2y agoCUDA is a decided abstraction with OpenCL I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually they pick a different abstraction to describe the interface they use for writing programs
- IshKebab 2y agoIt makes no business sense for them to try to get CUDA compatibility. That would just cement CUDA as the de facto standard, at which point they are locked in to playing catch up forever as nVidia intentionally adds features to break compatibility. Much more sensible to work on getting rock solid support for their own standards into all the major ML platforms/libraries.
- joe_the_user 2y agoIt 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 iteration of CPUs standards was set by AMD after Intel was unable to sell their completely new standard). Still, I'd acknowledge that "business sense" today follows the approach of only aiming for markets the company can completely control and by that measure, CUDA compatibility isn't desirable.
- Keyframe 2y agoMaybe they can use LLMs now to program their platform for them? </snark or not really>
- pjietr 2y agoSilo.ai is mostly a consulting house for various proof-of-concept type of projects with the LLM product being only the recent addition
- antupis 2y agoSilo mainly does consulting and those models were kinda done on side. But great for founders and truly weird acquisition for AMD.