Lisa Su formally welcomes Silo AI team to AMD after completing $665 million acquisition

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Silo AI is the latest in a spate of AI acquisitions by AMD.

AMD AI
(Image credit: AMD)

AMD CEO Lisa Su welcomed Silo AI co-founder Peter Sarlin and the entire team on X after the chip company formally completed its acquisition. Silo AI, one of the largest private AI labs in Europe, specializes in creating AI tech for huge enterprise customers, like Allianz, Philips, Rolls-Royce, and Unilever. Furthermore, the Silo AI team has created multilingual open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) that help others build AI tech based on local languages.

AMD says that Silo AI's expertise will help further its commitment to deliver end-to-end AI solutions based on open standards and in strong partnership with the global AI ecosystem. "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," noted AMD Artificial Intelligence Group (AIG) Senior Vice President Vamsi Boppana.

"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," added Boppana. "We expect their expertise and software capabilities will directly improve the experience for customers in delivering the best performing AI solutions on AMD platforms."

The Silo AI acquisition has been in the works since early last month, but it isn't the only investment that Team Red has been making in AI. Over the past year, the company has spent over $125 million acquiring other AI startups, including Mipsology and Nod.ai, to help expand its AI capability on the software side.

This is a crucial move for AMD, as Nvidia is currently dominating the hardware side of the AI business, with almost 98% data center GPU market revenue share in 2023. There have even been accusations that Team Green's AI research team scraped 'A Human Lifetime' of videos per day to train its in-house model.

We can also say that one of the more important developments here is Silo AI's work on open-source AI. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said, "Open-source AI is the foundation of AI development." This is already apparent in some Chinese AI models built off open-source code that can match existing American chatbots in benchmarks.

Although Nvidia seems to be winning the AI race at the moment, these acquisitions could help AMD get a foothold, at least on the software side. And if it could entice companies to build upon the open-source AI tech that the Silo AI team could build for AMD, then it might also propel sales of AMD Instinct AI chips.

Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • YSCCC
    Seriously, hope this AI bubble won't just derail everything and make some useless "AI" chips that do practically nothing useful as the crypto thingy
    Reply
  • ttquantia
    Hallucination is what kills most LLM applications, as there is no guarantee whatsoever that LLM-generated text or code is correct factually or otherwise. So it will always need humans, or complementary and completely different software technologies, for checking and correction. Not intelligent enough. By far.

    As this is so, like many believe, there is a huge AI bubble just waiting to burst. Wishful thinking that LLMs somehow represent a huge step ahead in General AI is the root cause for the AI bubble.

    Think back a couple of years: Blockchains were supposed to revolutionize everything. Also, self-driving cars and autonomous drones were supposed to revolutionize everything. These and other things have some applications, but all those applications pale in comparison to the huge and completely imaginary revolution they used to represent.

    Think about it.
    Reply
  • usertests
    ttquantia said:
    As this is so, like many believe, there is a huge AI bubble just waiting to burst. Wishful thinking that LLMs somehow represent a huge step ahead in General AI is the root cause for the AI bubble.
    Probably. And the burst will benefit consumers somewhat.

    On the other hand, with all the interest and free money floating around, someone could come up with something far more powerful than an LLM based on a transformer architecture before the bubble bursts. And keep the "good" times rolling.
    Reply
  • Flayed
    Big Data was the last one, not sure how useful that turned out to be.

    pOuBCk8XMC8View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOuBCk8XMC8
    Reply
  • JTWrenn
    More conglomeration of an emerging market. Sure that will play out well.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    YSCCC said:
    Seriously, hope this AI bubble won't just derail everything and make some useless "AI" chips that do practically nothing useful as the crypto thingy
    it won't.

    "ai" (llm) is a fad same as nft's.
    While nobody really cares about "ai" the companies all spending to make it better will give us in time better digital assistants for those who want em.

    "ai" won't ever be profitable as its too "dumb" to pay for (it "might" have a spot in making game npc's more unique but very few would ever pay for that stuff except maybe to experience it once) . Big tech will learn this in time but doesnt change fact its beneficial for those who might wanna use it in future.

    also "ai" might backfire on some stuff as it would possibly enable cracking of paid content in film, game, pc application, etc. (new tech has always had good and bad outcomes and not really anything can do about it) since its been proven llm can be tricked into doing "bad stuff" even if theres rules that shouldnt allow it.


    Let the big firms waste their $ and just eat popcorn as you watch it unfold.
    Reply
  • YSCCC
    hotaru251 said:
    it won't.

    "ai" (llm) is a fad same as nft's.
    While nobody really cares about "ai" the companies all spending to make it better will give us in time better digital assistants for those who want em.

    "ai" won't ever be profitable as its too "dumb" to pay for (it "might" have a spot in making game npc's more unique but very few would ever pay for that stuff except maybe to experience it once) . Big tech will learn this in time but doesnt change fact its beneficial for those who might wanna use it in future.

    also "ai" might backfire on some stuff as it would possibly enable cracking of paid content in film, game, pc application, etc. (new tech has always had good and bad outcomes and not really anything can do about it) since its been proven llm can be tricked into doing "bad stuff" even if theres rules that shouldnt allow it.


    Let the big firms waste their $ and just eat popcorn as you watch it unfold.
    Lol, from what I am seeing is a trend to order for "AI ready" or similar BS on big chip makers... be it just renamed iGPU or whatever it seems they are bloating the price of the chip with no practical benefit 3 years down the road, so I am just whining about likelyhood that the new generation or two will be bloated with useless "features" while stagnating the real CPU progress due to diverted resources on R&D
    Reply