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Losses at DeepMind, the artificial intelligence firm owned by Google parent Alphabet, grew by 1.5 percent last year, according to its latest annual report, CNBC reports.
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The London-headquartered AI lab — founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg — had a loss of £477 million (US$649 million) in 2019, worse than the £470 million loss in 2018, according to documents filed Thursday with the U.K.’s Companies House registry.
The vast majority of DeepMind’s spending in 2019 went on “staff and other related costs,” with the annual report showing that some £468 million went toward this, up from £398 million in 2018.
DeepMind now employs around 1,000 people worldwide including some of the world’s leading AI research scientists, who can command annual salaries of more than $1 million. These top people, who often have PhDs from the likes of Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford or MIT, can command this sort of money because they’re also wanted by the likes of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.
A DeepMind spokesperson told CNBC: “During the period covered by these accounts, DeepMind laid the foundations for our groundbreaking results in protein structure prediction — a 50-year grand challenge in biology — and collaborated with teams across Google to deliver real-world impact at scale.”
“Our teams were involved in a huge range of projects, from improving the predictability of wind power to accelerating ecological research in the Serengeti. We’re excited to build on this unprecedented progress as we head into next year,” they added.
