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Comment by thenaturalist | Hacker News Reader

Huge 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.

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Congrats 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.

The 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.

Actually, 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

Europe’s tech ecosystem will still benefit a lot regardless. Zero-sum thinking is not good- it causes economic regression and poverty in the long run.

The fact you're posting this comment in a thread of a press release of the acquisition of a European startup entity is in itself a counterfactual, wouldn't you agree?

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.

> geniously recognized the value of free and global trade and invested heavily in its Navy to enable and protect said trade

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

oversimplified explanations here - great to relieve some hostility perhaps but not complete.. lots of holes in this blanket explanation.

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’m not sure we agree on what zero sum here means, but one direct consequence of having a decent exit here is that the investors in Silo will get a capital return they can use to raise more funds.

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).

Don’t European programmers make much less than Americans? I wouldn’t be surprised if they kept a pretty big footprint over there.

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.

> US unemployment rate

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

You say it's zero-sum then in the next sentence say "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", which surely implies that it's not necessarily zero-sum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox might be interesting to read.

The world is very much not zero sum and never has been. If it was then we'd be stuck in the stone age because every advancement that benefits one person would hurt the rest. Instead we see that over the course of history the average wealth of the world has gone up. There are certainly some negative intangibles that come from that (eg. climate change or ecosystem collapse) but it's hard to quantify if that makes it zero sum and even so, the context of this thread is about human vs human zero sum games.

The world was effectively a zero-sum game until the industrial revolution. For most of human history, the average growth per capita was something like 0.01%/year. There was some growth, but you could not see it in a single lifetime. Which is why conquering your neighbors, taking their possessions, and enslaving them was such a popular form of business.

I'm not sure I even agree with this. If by conquering your neighbors, your civilization grows 5x (as opposed to just having you + your neighbors), then doesn't that by definition mean it's not zero sum?

>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.

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.

>That would be a concern if the plan was to move the entire team to the US.

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.

> US tech giant who's profit center is in the US, not in EU, therefore mostly boosting the US economy in the process

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.

>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.

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.

Yes indeed, they bought it for peanuts? Wework got billions and many other BS startup. 665 million is like almost free

they have loyal and stable staff with healthy family lives unlike 8 of 10 California companies

Employee loyalty isn’t a good thing. One of the best things about Silicon Valley is that people can swiftly change companies when they get higher offers. Non-competes are void in California.

There’s a reason US salaries for software devs are 2-5x EU salaries for similar roles.

What if I told you that non - competes aren't a thing in Germany. (And a big part in other parts of US)

Well I'd tell you that they aren't a thing in California.

...as of six months ago.

Anyone could ask you to sign a non-compete. But in California, they have been legally unenforceable for as long as I have been alive.

What was changed is they now cannot make condition of employment based on signing this unenforceable contract.

As someone who has been stuck in Silicon Valley for 20 years I can say hands down the German and European teams I’ve worked with far outshine the hacker ego Hollywood hipster techbros of San Francisco. Yet the latter make 2-5x the income.

Thanks :) (

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)

employee loyalty is a good thing if it's bought and not expected

>There’s a reason US salaries for software devs are 2-5x EU salaries for similar roles.

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.

> 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.

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...

>After accounting for all these, an SV, NYC, Seattle, etc., engineer ends up with far more disposable income than their EU counterpart.

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.

Point noted, Wikipedia breaks down the data better - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c....

Housing is notably not included here. Further, while it says government or non-profit provided health care and educated are included in the incomes for countries where it's available, the countries where it is NOT available don't show a reduced disposable income to pay for these things. These data do not show what you think they show. They already show a smaller gap than you had originally implied, and as I stated earlier, that gap is going to narrow substantially when the rest of these factors are taken into account.

I agree with you, but OECD's disposable income does not include housing, education, healthcare, or childcare unless they're paid through taxes.

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