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.
Huge welcome to @petersarlin and @silo_AI team! So happy to have you join @AMD! https://t.co/z2dQYw6b82August 12, 2024
"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.
A pivotal and emotional moment, thrilled to officially join forces with @LisaSu & @AMD on a shared mission to shape the future of AI computing. The future of AI is bright, and I'm honored that this @silo_AI team will be positioned to play a key role in shaping it as part of AMD! https://t.co/E9lX4DXIEa pic.twitter.com/Cx3xChidKJAugust 12, 2024
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.