Monday, August 12th 2024
AMD Completes Acquisition of Silo AI
AMD today announced the completion of its acquisition of Silo AI, the largest private AI lab in Europe. The all-cash transaction valued at approximately $665 million furthers the company's commitment to deliver end-to-end AI solutions based on open standards and in strong partnership with the global AI ecosystem. Silo AI brings a team of world-class AI scientists and engineers to AMD experienced in developing cutting-edge AI models, platforms and solutions for large enterprise customers including Allianz, Philips, Rolls-Royce and Unilever. Their expertise spans diverse markets and they have created state-of-the-art open source multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) including Poro and Viking on AMD platforms. The Silo AI team will join the AMD Artificial Intelligence Group (AIG), led by AMD Senior Vice President Vamsi Boppana.
"AI is our number one strategic priority, and we continue to invest in both the talent and software capabilities to support our growing customer deployments and roadmaps," said Vamsi Boppana, AMD senior vice president, AIG. "The Silo AI team has developed state-of-the-art language models that have been trained at scale on AMD Instinct accelerators and they have broad experience developing and integrating AI models to solve critical problems for end customers. We expect their expertise and software capabilities will directly improve the experience for customers in delivering the best performing AI solutions on AMD platforms."
"AI is our number one strategic priority, and we continue to invest in both the talent and software capabilities to support our growing customer deployments and roadmaps," said Vamsi Boppana, AMD senior vice president, AIG. "The Silo AI team has developed state-of-the-art language models that have been trained at scale on AMD Instinct accelerators and they have broad experience developing and integrating AI models to solve critical problems for end customers. We expect their expertise and software capabilities will directly improve the experience for customers in delivering the best performing AI solutions on AMD platforms."
34 Comments on AMD Completes Acquisition of Silo AI
By the way there is no expiration on being a startup. A company can last in such a state for a long time.
Mind you, AMD could also use more expertise in the field to push it's hardware and software AI stack. Excitement around AI will eventually reduce but the technology will remain huge in many ways and represents an entirely new market of significant size.
Now maybe you can make the argument that investing in this particular AI company was a "Waste of money", I honestly don't follow AI investing and know nothing about them.
Pessimists point out that even GPT-4 seemed to have little commercial utility, in the sense of starting to replace significant percentages of all human labour.
Who knows? This acquisition might do AMD good in the end.
The biggest issue I have with 'AI' is it being mostly off-site/cloud.
The largest Llama 3.1 models, reasonably quantized without too much damage to capability, need 200+GB just to load, before any allocation of working memory.It won't matter if AI actually works out; AI capable of surpassing human capability in all categories would do better without humanity, and lesser intelligence cannot reliably predict - or control - actions or designs of greater intelligence. It's Scylla of burst soap scum and dashed dreams or Charybdis of AI doom in some form, and there is not much of a middle ground I could see right now.
One day it is going to burst...
Just like the dot-com bubble, it will be ugly
As long as the focus is on "Good GPU programmers", its a fine purchase. AMD is weak on the software front, and the software being written today is AI. I am not bullish on AI at all, but AMD is sorely in need of good programmers.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
"In 2000, the dot-com bubble burst, and many dot-com startups went out of business after burning through their venture capital and failing to become profitable.[5] However, many others, particularly online retailers like eBay and Amazon, blossomed and became highly profitable."
This is the same for any new market, a ton of startups pop up and most of them go out of business finding what does and doesn't work.
If you are implying that AI has no use you'd be dead wrong, just from a medical and engineering perspective it's already indispensable.
There was basically no way to tell Ask Jeeves vs Google in the 90s. Similarly today, there is absolutely no way you can tell a good AI company from a bad one. And the vast, vast majority of AI companies will be bad, even if there's a couple of good apples in there somewhere.
The only guaranteed winner here seems to be NVidia. However, USA is running out of electricity this year due to the massive increases in training / GPUs getting plugged into new data centers (!!!), the expansion of GPU-data centers will be forcibly stopped in the near future due to lack of power. So even NVidia's growth has an end.
www.power-eng.com/policy-regulation/oh-thats-not-good-energy-prices-for-pjm-capacity-auction-skyrocket-9x/#gref
Alternatively, you hire them as interns and wait like 5 years, and then maybe 50% of them are reasonable programmers and maybe 10% of them are comparable to a company purchase in terms of skill level. And those 10% will be looking for new jobs as their resumes have improved and there's no guarantee they actually stay at your company.
Some serial entrepreneurs will never join a big company (and small companies like this have plenty of those kind of programmers). But others are tired of the startup-uncertainty and are happy to get taken under the care of a larger company.
Acqui-hires are a trope for a reason.