Yesterday this desk read the accounts of an AI company that shrank. Today, the accounts of one that did the opposite

Yesterday I set out what the filed accounts of BenevolentAI showed: a company built so machines could do the discovering, down from 343 people to 173 in a year.

If that were the only company this desk read, it would be a misleading paper. So today, the same note in the accounts of a different British company doing the same kind of thing, and the numbers run the other way.

Wayve Technologies Ltd is a London company building software that lets a car drive itself. Fifteen of its vehicles are licensed on London roads, each carrying a human required to sit in it. Its accounts are filed at Companies House like anyone else's.

Note 7 is headed Employees. It gives the average monthly number of people employed, including directors, and it reads: 80 in 2021, 134 in 2022, 202 in 2023, 263 in 2024. The company more than tripled in three years.

The wage bill went the same way, and faster. Wages and salaries were 5.8 million pounds in 2021, then 12.8 million, then 21 million, then 31.1 million in 2024.

Divide one by the other, as we did yesterday, and you get what the company pays per person. About 72,400 pounds in 2021. Then 95,700. Then 104,000. Then 118,100 in 2024.

So this is not a company that grew by hiring cheaply. It grew by hiring more people and paying each of them substantially more, a rise of 63 per cent per head in three years while the headcount more than tripled. On these figures, the business of teaching a machine to do a job is expensive human work.

Three things the record does not tell us, and they matter.

It stops in August 2024. That is the most recent year filed, and it is two years before the London licence that put those fifteen cars on the road. Nothing here describes what the company looks like now.

It gives no split by function. BenevolentAI divided its people into research and administration. Wayve gives one line, one number, everybody. So we cannot say from these accounts how many of those 263 people are engineers and how many are the ones who sit in the cars. Nobody publishes that.

And the average is an average. It includes the highest paid and the lowest paid in one figure, so 118,100 pounds is not what anybody earns. It is what the company spends per head.

What the two sets of accounts establish between them is narrower than either would on its own, and more useful. In the same industry, in the same country, in the same years, one company built to replace human judgement shed two thirds of its people. Another built to replace human labour more than tripled its own. Both filed their numbers in Britain. Both are on the public record. Neither was reported at the time.