George Osborne works in AI now. Can he please leave some jobs for the rest of us?

The only surprise about the former chancellor’s new gig in Silicon Valley is that it has taken him so long to get there, says Kat Brown

Just to really hammer home the crushing pressure of mid-December, new ONS data shows that UK unemployment is at 5.1 per cent: a full point up from when Labour took over a year ago. God bless us, everyone.

One person untouched by such gloom-inducing stats is renowned jobs magnet/magnate, George Osborne, currently updating the hardest-working LinkedIn profile in Britain with the news that he is to join OpenAI in January.

I am nothing if not impressed. No wonder there’s an unemployment crisis; George Osborne has more side hustles than a millennial freelancer. I did have a panicky moment when I misheard his age and thought he might actually be a millennial – nothing more stressful than someone your age posting an update starting “Some personal news” – but no, Osborne is 54 and thus very much Gen X. Perhaps, like every self-respecting Silicon Valley tech bro these days, he’ll simply start ageing backwards.

Osborne’s OpenAI role adds to his roster of jobs including museum hun (chair of the British Museum), crypto hun (adviser to cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase) and podcast hun (co-host with former Labour minister Ed Balls). He is apparently dropping his role as investment banker hun, which he has held since he left the Evening Standard in 2020, and which was taken over by Evercore in the summer.

He will be a bridge between Silicon Valley and the British Government and will be based in London, which does, rather sadly, put paid to the George-out-of-water images of Osborne in the famously casual San Francisco.

But it is a question of magnetism rather than ‘girl boss’ hustle: in 2017, Matthew d’Ancona quoted a political friend of Osbourne’s in GQ, who said: "George has an incredible knack of getting into things. He's not a pushy networker. It's more like some hypnotic effect he has: people want him to join them."

Certainly, this new role seems to be a jealousy tactic by OpenAi after Rishi Sunak did a “personal news” update in October, stating that he was joining their rival, Anthropic, as an advisor. Silicon Valley AI firms have been jostling for position in the UK: Microsoft recently announced that it would be investing $30bn to scale up AI infrastructure in the UK, with an additional $1bn being invested by other tech companies, including Nvidia and Google.

And, of course, he is only the latest emigre from the world of British and European politics to take a consultant role at the right hand of a Silicon Valley bigwig. Nick Clegg, George’s former Cabinet colleague, hung up his Meta boots this year and might have some advice for him about tech bro Californians.

‘They operate in a maze of acronyms, as if language itself is a time-wasting exercise that needs to be boiled down to its most abbreviated form,’ said Clegg in his recent memoir, whose sense of culture shock was compounded when he found himself having to wrestle his deputy at an MMA gym.

While AI undoubtedly has its benefits, Osborne’s role chatting up the government to up the ante on AI usage comes as the Trump administration has stalled talks on the wider UK-US Technology Prosperity Deal announced in September. While the $31bn is unaffected, the US is now stalling on the deal due to what the New York Times reported as “broader disagreements” over digital regulations and that well-known online stratagem, food safety rules.

Quite what the quality of beef has to do with tech is anyone’s guess, but the Trump team appears to be tying the tech deal into the Economic Prosperity Deal supposedly struck in May and dragging its heels accordingly.

So good luck to George – he’ll certainly need it. At least he’ll be able to have a drink and commiserate with Rishi when the AI bubble becomes too much – and of course, he has all those roles to fall back on.