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What is it about former British government ministers that makes them so appealing to U.S. tech firms? Former U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is joining OpenAI to be head of OpenAI for Countries, based in London. The title is a little vague, but according to OpenAI's chief global affairs executive, Chris Lehane, Osborne will be working with governments around the world to develop AI infrastructure—including computing capacity—and everything that goes along with ramping up the use of AI. That includes worker training, using AI to improve public services and establishing safety and cybersecurity standards. Osborne will need a big team.

The appointment is reminiscent of Meta Platforms' hiring of former British Prime Minister Nick Clegg as a global affairs executive in 2018 (Anthropic and Microsoft more recently hired former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as an adviser, although they're part-time roles). Clegg oversaw policy and dealings with governments, which sounds a lot like Osborne's new job—except the scope of Osborne's job is much bigger. Even more than social media, AI promises to transform everyday life. Given the importance of dealing with those persnickety European regulators, picking a former U.K. government minister made sense for Meta—and OpenAI. 

The Osborne hiring is a reminder of how the company is—unwittingly or not—following Meta's playbook in various ways. As we reported in October, about one-fifth of OpenAI's workforce previously worked at Meta, including Fidji Simo, CEO of applications, who was once head of Facebook at Meta. OpenAI's slack even has a channel just for former Meta employees, our story said. And quite a few of OpenAI's strategies resembled Meta's. Most fundamentally, just as Meta's apps have gigantic audiences, OpenAI's ChatGPT is a hugely popular app, with nearly 900 million weekly active users, we reported last week. Most of those users don't pay anything. Introducing advertising to the app appears to be a no-brainer for OpenAI eventually. While CEO Sam Altman has said he finds ads distasteful, he also said in a podcast in October that he likes ads on Meta's Instagram.

Osborne's hiring, and the global nature of his job, is also a reminder of the grandeur of Altman's vision for OpenAI. He wants to build a vertically integrated global giant as fast as he possibly can. But the scale of what he is attempting seems to grow by the day.

Paramount's Wrinkle

The Ellison family's hopes of using their ties to the Trump administration to win the takeover battle for Warner Bros. Discovery got a setback on Tuesday. Firstly, President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, withdrew from the investor group helping finance the WBD bid of Ellison-controlled Paramount, Bloomberg reported.

While the impact isn't great financially—Kushner's Affinity Partners was only expected to contribute about $200 million out of $41 billion in equity being raised, the Bloomberg report said—his absence will deprive Paramount of a key conduit to Trump. On top of that, Trump posted on TruthSocial a complaint about how he had been treated by Paramount's CBS since the Ellisons took control of the network. "For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called 'takeover,' than they have ever treated me before."

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that WBD plans to reject Paramount's offer over concerns about its financing. WBD already has a deal with Netflix and seems determined to stick with the streaming giant. As far as Paramount's financing is concerned, the Ellisons have already promised to backstop all of the equity financing Paramount requires. Perhaps the family needs to strengthen its guarantees.

In Other News

• Databricks said it had raised more than $4 billion from investors including Insight Partners, Fidelity and J.P. Morgan Asset Management, valuing the AI software firm at $134 billion.

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