AMD acquires language modeling company Silo AI for $665 million

Advanced Micro Devices Announced The company plans to acquire Silo AI Oy, a Finnish artificial intelligence development company with many large corporate clients.

The all-cash deal is valued at approximately $665 million and is expected to close later this year, at which point AMD will incorporate Silo AI into its artificial intelligence group, which is responsible for the company's MI300 series of machine learning accelerators that compete with market-leading NVIDIA graphics cards, among other products.

Silo AI provides AI development and deployment services to large organizations. It helps companies identify business tasks that can be automated with AI. From there, Silo AI can train custom language models that can perform those tasks. It also develops other types of neural networks, such as computer vision algorithms for detecting defective components on production lines.

Building new AI models isn't the company's only focus: Silo AI can also take on the technical work of integrating neural networks with an organization's other workloads and maintaining them over time. The company says it has completed more than 200 AI projects for large enterprises such as Allianz SE, Nokia Corp. and Siemens AG.

In addition to its core services portfolio, Silo AI offers several packaged AI tools, collectively known as Silo OS. The bundle includes development tools designed to facilitate enterprises' internal machine learning initiatives, as well as AI applications for use cases such as document search.

Last year, Silo AI expanded its software portfolio by adding two open-source large-scale language models. The first, Viking, understands English, Nordic languages, and some programming syntax. In November, Silo AI announced Poro, a more advanced LLM with a similar feature set and about five times as many parameters.

With the acquisition, AMD will gain not only Silo AI's software portfolio, but also a 300-person machine learning team, about a third of whose staff hold PhDs, according to the companies. AMD said: Financial Times The Silo AI team plans to further develop open-source LLMs like Viking and Poro after the deal closes.

According to the paper, the chipmaker also sees an opportunity to improve the customer experience for companies that buy its processors. Building large AI clusters with hundreds or more AI chips takes a lot of time and effort. By offering Silo AI's machine learning know-how to its customers, AMD could streamline the process.

“Silo AI's trusted team of AI experts and proven experience in developing leadership AI models and solutions, including cutting-edge LLMs built on AMD platforms, will further accelerate our AI strategy and drive the building and rapid implementation of AI solutions for customers around the world,” said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of the Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD.

Chip Manufacturer Before The company acquired Nod.ai (formally Nod Inc.), developer of an open-source AI tool called SHARK. The software is designed to accelerate the speed at which AI models perform inference, the task of analyzing production data. SHARK claims to deliver up to three times better inference performance than competing tools such as TensorFlow.

Image: AMD