AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M
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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.
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.
Omniverse, Isaac, Metropolis, Rapids, etc.
I don’t remember any alternatives in uni. Maybe OpenCL but only lightly mentioned
Nah. People teach what they use because that's what's easy.
I'm sure plenty of professors use CUDA in their courses because it's what they actually use. At the same time, in 2013 when I was in college I took a course on "parallel computing" as a CS elective. The professor told us on day 1 that NVidia was sponsoring the course and had donated a bunch of GPUs to the clusters we could remotely connect into for the sake of the class. Naturally we used CUDA exclusively.
I know for a fact that this happened at a lot of schools. I don't know if it's still happening since I'm not in that world anymore, but don't see why it would have stopped.
You can pretty much translate something like https://github.com/jcupitt/opencl-experiments/blob/master/Op... with string replace function names.
Do you have a source for this claim? Or do you simply mean that since they spend money making it better that professors end up using it on their own accord?
Had to buy a new power supply just so I could use it.
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.
Anti-competitive means 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.
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.
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.
One of our machine learning courses was taught in Matlab.
Unsurprisingly, nobody used Matlab after uni, or 5 years later.
It isn't particularly fast though, and the simplicity quickly becomes an obstacle when solving a real problem.
It’s a great language choice for it
It weeded out the script kiddies who incorrectly signed up wanting a Tensorflow or PyTorch course
It’s a fairly bland and slow but usable language for the task
Shits me off to no end a lot of engineering courses moreorless indoctrinate their students into using it unconditionally, though
Octave exists but is a relative pain to use
Those companies have money to make ‘nice’ things which open source software doesn’t have the time to do.
For 100m you could probably make some pretty sweet clones if amd is hiring anybody to man that position.
that's a little harsh :D
I would posit it's a lack of will rather than time.
Thousands of OSS devs would be willing to devote serious time to it, but can’t/won’t run the gauntlet of starting such a ludicrously large project from scratch
It’s easy to contribute, difficult to be the one organising the contributions
A real “where do I even begin” problem
Nvidia makes software that induces demand for their products. Sometimes that software is a tool, or a platform, or an ML model, or foundational research on algorithms.
Mindshare shifts slowly.
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.
> 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.
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.
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, technology enabled economy will behave in a zero-sum fashion is just plain wrong.
The US is where it is today because post WWII it geniously recognized the value of free and global trade and invested heavily in its Navy to enable and protect said trade.
Instead of making things on your own in the US, you could sit in New York and invest globally - the value of your investment and access to its dividends guaranteed by the power of the US military.
Relative value against the status quo is created every day everywhere by millions of smart people.
What Europe - and Finland in that example - has is a century old tradition and established infrastructure for high education.
That investment will continue to pay off for the foreseeable future.
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
History of trade protectionism ? that is older than sailing ships. Yes, the achievements of old Europe include flaming the largest and deadliest wars in world history. The USA benefited from not being destroyed? sure OK.. maybe war is a bad idea for prosperity.
Modern trade values might be divided into "oil and gas" and then everything else.. "arms trade" and then everything else.. Big Pharma ? ok you got me, yes the US rules it financially, but then old Europe has some assets like that, but not on front stage.. thinking textile dye chemistry for an example.
The USA has no special awards for inventing trade protectionism, just a vigorous practice at the right time due to the idiocy of others.
You speak English pretty well.. maybe that language is part of the success here? many other angles easily come to mind...
I don’t know what the founders of Silo will do, but the investors are in the business of investing, and incrementally the viability of being an AI VC in this area has gone up (depends on the counterfactual but I think cash exit is better than some chance of IPO).
Big picture the US unemployment rate is quite a bit lower than the EU, so I’m sure any global company is happy to draw from the bigger pool.
Finally, benefits can be unbalanced in favor of one entity or another without being zero sum. Even if the US benefits more from this deal, the purchasing company, AMD, still turns sand into extremely valuable electronics. That’s not a zero-sum activity.
do not believe this number.. it is a manipulated statistic on the front line of old class wars regarding labor versus capital. hint- capital interests know the Federal government very well
That would be a concern if the plan was to move the entire team to the US. But if the Finland based company just becomes a part of AMD then I see little downside. Some very competent people in Finland now have $665M to fund new startups.
Ultimately I think the most important question is where the interesting and high productivity work gets done. That's the place that benefits most.
The issue is that all that Finnish labor now fuels a US tech giant who's profit center is in the US, not in EU, therefore mostly boosting the US economy in the process.
Then there's also the trade barriers that come with now becoming a US tech company instead of a Finnish one. You can't sell to China, and other countries on the US's shit list without Uncle Sam's approval.
More of a matter of accounting than reality. For years, Apple were deliberately not repatriating their profits to avoid tax, keeping them out of the US economy. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/17/it-looks-like-apple-is-bring...
The question of where a profit is actually made for a multinational company can be very unclear.
No, this is not how it works. Assuming Silo AI continues to operate out of Finland, its investments, the consumption of its employees and its exports will continue to count towards Finland's GDP just like before. Any profits go to AMD shareholders all over the world, not just in the US. The strategic alignment between Silo AI and AMD may well benefit both Finland and the US.
We have a similar debate in the UK regarding DeepMind. And yes it's true, if you assume that DeepMind or Silo AI would have become world dominating tech behemoths in their own right, then it would have been better for Britain/Finland if they hadn't been sold.
But it's also possible that the UK and Finish operations are ultimately more successful as part of Google/AMD because they benefit from strategic opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have.
I'm not saying that headquarters don't matter or that there are no downsides (e.g wrt corporation tax). What I am saying is that it's not automatically a bad thing for a country if a company gets sold to a foreign corporation.
One thing is for sure. It's far better to have a lot of US subsidiaries in the country than watching your graduates and startup founders leave for the US.
There’s a reason US salaries for software devs are 2-5x EU salaries for similar roles.
What was changed is they now cannot make condition of employment based on signing this unenforceable contract.
But I guess there are also very capable American teams and narcissistic European CS.
(I guess it is a very good question why this difference exist and how to change economic policy)
When you account for medical costs, rent (especially compared to the localities in the USA that provide these huge salaries), extra vacation time, and for those with children, education and child care, this gap narrows considerably.
Rent alone... one can find a reasonable spot in Berlin for ~$1300/mo. Good luck finding more than a shared box in the Tenderloin for that much in the Bay Area.
That's what Europeans generally say to justify or cope with their low salaries, but it's not true. After accounting for all these, an SV, NYC, Seattle, etc., engineer ends up with far more disposable income than their EU counterpart.
The US has the highest average disposable income worldwide; the rest almost don't come close [1]. That's why it has much more entrepreneurial activity.
Yes, the US isn't perfect, but the EU doesn't come close to the US in terms of money for highly skilled professional workers.
1- https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-household-di...
I said it narrows the gap, not closes it.
>https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-household-di...
Your link is behind a paywall, I can't view that data.
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?
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".
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.
Think of it as a reverse McDonnell-Douglas.
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!
> x86 is never going to reclaim the crown of most important architecture
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.
Look at it this way; Apple can design their own cores whether they use ARM or RISC-V, and control the software from top to bottom either way. Nvidia's already shipping RISC-V microcontrollers to cut down on manufacturing margins, and without better options the rest of the world might follow. ARM's dominance is only possible if better RISC options don't exist; and for anyone that's not ARM the idea of IP serfdom sounds awful.
In my mind it's not about AI per se, but about using the hot use case for GPU to drive meaningful change in your software stack. There are tons and tons and tons of GPGPU users out there who aren't training LLMs but who need a high-quality compute stack.
There's everything to fix. AMD is sitting on a gold mine and is squandering massive amounts of money every month that they don't just get their shitty software stack in order.
AMD could be as rich as NVIDIA. Instead, Lisa Su for some insane reason refuses to build even the most mediocre ML-capable libraries for their GPUs.
If I could ask anyone in the ML world at the moment what the heck they're thinking, it would be her. Nothing makes sense about AMDs actions for years on this topic. If I was the board, I'd be talking about her exit for wasting such an opportunity.
Spending $665m on a company that builds AI tooling, is a refusal?
They'd get more value offering $500k+ comp to a few people from https://handmadecities.com/
It is a wonder why you aren't the CEO.
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.
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,”
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39344815
Much more sensible to work on getting rock solid support for their own standards into all the major ML platforms/libraries.
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.
The key is that while there were many clones of x86, there never really was an attempt at a company built around "run MS Windows programs natively" because maintaining software compatability is an order of magnitude harder than doing it for hardware.
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).
Microsoft's entire history is around building a moat of APIs because the PC software industries has a wide variety. Nvidia has, so far, been focused on building actually useful things for developers. Basically, where all the other manufacturers viewed their chips as special purpose devices, Nvidia allowed developers to treat their chips as generic parallel processors and this facilitated the current AI revolution/bubble. Now that Nvidia has created this market, it can charge by the use rather than charging by processing power. The thing is that Nvidia's large potential competitors simply don't want to create clones even if they could - because clones would have to be sold by processing power rather than with a markup for their usefulness. It's worth looking at the list of x86 compatible makers [1]. Making an x86 wasn't quite something you could do in your garage but clearly the barriers to entry weren't huge. But any Nvidia compatible is going to cost a large amount of capital but can only sell by processor power and so AMD, Intel and similar sized entities don't have an interest in doing this.
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.
Technology stocks are the only ones I personally day trade for that reason. Example: at the beginning of a pandemic lockdowns, any HN user could have anticipated increased internet usage and buy Cloudflare/Fastly stock and made a lot of money before the rest of the market realized that CDN companies will significantly benefit from that specific macro event.
I'm not convinced the market (or market analysts) have a deep understanding of Nividia's long-term advantage. If they did, we would have seen a much slower and steadier valuation increase rather than the meteoric rise. Meteoric stock price rise/fall = the market is having trouble valuing the stock.
In other words, stock prices don't add much to the conversation.
Nvidia's revenue is now greater than Intel's with 20% of the employees that Intel has. Their PE ratio is 78, roughly double that of Intel.
The market valued Nvidia as growing and Intel as not.
Last paragraph
No they don't. Both Intel and AMD compare their newest GPU favorably against Nvidia's H100 that has been on the market longer and soon to be replaced and then it's never H100 NVL for a reason.
Intel and AMD can sell their GPU's only with lower profit margin. If they could match FLOPS per total ownership they would sell much better.
Both are years behind.
Both companies will leapfrog each other with new releases. Anyone who believes that there should only be a single vendor for all AI compute will quickly find themselves on the wrong side of history
8x AMD MI300X (192GB, 750W)
8x H100 SXM5 (80GB, 700W)
What the customer does not see is how AMD must spend 2 times more money to produce a chip that is competitive against architecture that is soon 2 years old.
Probably because they aren't widely available yet. It is also a dual card to get that much memory, which is still less than 192GB and far less than 288GB.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/18780/nvidia-announces-h100-n...
> What the customer does not see is how AMD must spend 8-10 times more money to produce a chip that is competitive against architecture that is soon 2 years old.
Source?
8x H100 NVL (94GB, 800W)
This reminds me of those "192GB is fantastic" people that bought maxed-out M2 Ultras for AI inference. It can be awesome, but you need a substantial amount of interconnect bandwidth and powerful enough local compute before it's competitive. In products where AI is an afterthought, you're fighting against much different constraints than just having a lot of high-bandwidth memory.
I've always rooted for Team Red when they made an effort to do things open-source and transparently. They're a good role-model for the rest of the industry, in a certain sense. But I have to make peace with the fact that client-side AI running on my AMD machines isn't happening. Meanwhile, I've been using CUDA, CUDNN, CUBLAS, DLSS, on my Nvidia machine for years. On Linux!
But valuation isn't the NVDA trade right now; it's that there's still a bigger fool.
AMD P/E ratio 263.25
If NVDA is overpriced, AMD is REALLY over-priced.
Profits are very volatile. E.g. if AMD doubles the revenue profits might go 10x up, as R&D costs do not depend on the number of units sold
Displacing C++ in compiler development and HFT/HPC/GPGPU with Java 22, most likely not happening, everwhere else it has been loosing mindshare, the current cybersecurity laws versus WG21 attitude towards them, doesn't help.
already opensourced ROCm/HIP
https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/fb8876069d89aaf27cc9...
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.
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-a...
[1]: https://www.goodnewsfinland.com/en/articles/breaking-news/20...
There is this saying that "don't sell the cow when you can sell the milk" - maybe there is still some wisdom... but Finland keeps selling the cow and buying the milk back over and over again. And then they wonder why the state of the economy is so sad and they never see "new Nokia".
It looks like 300 “AI experts” employed. So I guess they have paid $2M a pop. I’m not sure how to put that into perspective really, though…
What was the per employee acquisition cost of WhatsApp (who had 50 employees, IIRC)?
Though apparently MI300X is a fine product as well. But it still needs code.
https://doku.lrz.de/usage-statistics-for-supermuc-ng-1148309...
Smaller machines will tend lower from what i have seen. If you give a large enough pool of scientists access to significant compute resources, they will generally figure out how to saturate them. Also, scientific teams often can't pay top software engineers. Lots of hardware is a way to compensate for inefficient code. If Lumi is underutilized to such an extent someone is funking up.
There is of course no commercial use case for these computers. That's not the point of these machines.
[1] https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/resources/c...
$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.)
- 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.
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.
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.
The start of the startup investment pipeline in Finland has been flowing pretty well. The outputs at the end of the pipeline have been more questionable. Silo’s acquisition is a positive example of activity at that end.
He also trashed a lot of good and useful software projects for seemingly protectionist reasons (if it wasn't ATI/Markham, it was dumped)
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.
"In July 2024, Silo AI has 300+ employees out of which 125+ hold a PhD degree."
Mainly talent I guess which they can put to accelerating Triton development, their alternative to CUDA.
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.
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.
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.
It's why the 'fine wine' spin on the long term performance of AMD GPUs exists in gaming circles.
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).
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.
Joint AMD / Silo AI press release: https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1206/am...
[1]: https://www.silo.ai/ [2]: https://huggingface.co/SiloAI
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-hua...
To be clear, i'm not disagreeing, I really don't know, but yeah $665M, could do a lot with that.
It's just always wonky as acquisitions generally don't seem to be 100% known quantities / outcomes. People paying big premiums for what sometimes turn out to be nothing.
That package of talent and etc is handy, but also seems like sometimes it makes it harder to really know what you'll get out of it. It's an interesting dynamic.
Feels like a company saying they're going to "spend a few weeks paying down tech debt", which generally amounts to nothing getting done. Progress happens in creative pursuit of another goal and with hard constraints, in my experience. You can fix a specific piece of tech debt while working on a product feature that's adjacent to it, and you can create some great tooling and drivers while working on a product that needs them, but just setting aside the money for greenfield development often/usually ends up with it being set alight. I have worked at least one very well-funded place where the lack of product focus and thus lack of any constraints has just led to endless wheel spinning under the guise of "research".
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.
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.
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-mi3...
https://www.nscale.com/blog/nscale-benchmarks-amd-mi300x-gpu...