Former chancellor George Osborne has been appointed managing director and head of OpenAI for Countries to increase government's AI capacity.
The 54-year-old, who previously served as chancellor under the Conservative government from 2010 to 2016, will take up the London-based role in January and lead the expansion of the programme, OpenAI said.
The hire follows rival AI start-up Anthropic’s appointment of former prime minister Rishi Sunak as an adviser in October, The Times reports.
Osborne said OpenAI, which has been valued at about $500billion, was “the most exciting and promising company in the world right now”.
OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane said Osborne's decision to join the company reflected "a shared belief that AI is becoming critical infrastructure – and early decisions about how it's built, governed, and deployed will shape economics and geopolitics for years to come."
His appointment comes as Amazon is in talks to invest more than $10billion in OpenAI and sell it more chips and computing power, in the latest investment deal tying the AI start-up to its infrastructure providers.
Amazon is discussing an agreement that would push OpenAI’s valuation above $500billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Any deal is expected to include OpenAI using Amazon’s Trainium series of AI chips and renting more data centre capacity to run its models and tools such as ChatGPT, the people said.
The talks, first reported by the Information, remain at an early stage, the people added. The proposed deal comes as the start-up uncouples from its early backer Microsoft. The two companies restructured their relationship in late October, allowing OpenAI to agree data centre deals with rival cloud providers.
The start-up signed a deal with Amazon a few days after the agreement with Microsoft was reached, committing to spend $38billion renting servers over seven years.