George Osborne has a new job in tech, and it doesn't bode well for Britain OpenAI is the latest to make a political hire as big tech spreads its tentacles around the world. Since leaving frontline politics, the former chancellor has served as the chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, edited (not entirely successfully) the Evening Standard, advised asset manager BlackRock, joined boutique advisory firm Robey Warshaw, been appointed as the chair of the British Museum and taken on roles including advising crypto firm Coinbase . But Osborne's latest job is the most eye-opening - and is an alarming augur of what is to come. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has become the latest organisation to employ Osborne . He will run OpenAI for Countries, a unit tasked with working directly with governments while expanding the company's Stargate datacentre programme beyond the US.

The two had a blowout argument over the future direction of OpenAI – the company they came together to found in 2015 – with Altman seemingly content to pursue a for-profit approach and Musk feeling that was forswearing the founding principles of the firm as well as its name. OpenAI couldn't be open, he reckoned, if it was closed off and trying to make money rather than better humanity. So it's no surprise that Musk, who lodged an audacious bid to take over Twitter a little more than two years ago, which ended up with his ownership of the platform now called X, has sought to put a spoiler in two years of near-untrammelled growth for OpenAI. Musk – who is currently overhauling (to his supporters; "tearing down" to his opponents) the US government to be, as he would describe it, leaner and more efficient while also devastating important programmes such as international aid and cutting-edge scientific research – has lodged a near 100bn bid for OpenAI's non-profit arm. "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was," Musk said in a statement supplied by the lawyer shepherding his bid.

Imagine someone drives up to a pub in a top-of-the-range sports car – a 1.5m Koenigsegg Regera, to pick one at random – parks up and saunters out of the vehicle. They come into the pub you're drinking in and begin walking around its patrons, slipping their hand into your pocket in full view, smiling at you as they take out your wallet and empty it of its cash and cards. The not-so-subtle pickpocket stops if you shout and ask what the hell they're doing. "Sorry for the inconvenience," the pickpocket says. Yet it seems to be the approach the government is pursuing in order to placate AI companies. A consultation is soon to open, the Financial Times reports, that will allow AI companies to scrape content from individuals and organisations unless they explicitly opt out of their data being used.

If you were looking for an inkblot test for your view of big tech's investment in artificial intelligence, you could hardly do better than the news that Google is ordering the construction of at least six small nuclear reactors to power the growth of the technology. Here, in one view, is an enlightened business leveraging its size to invest in infrastructure that could change the world for the better. Here, in another, is a poorly regulated corporation ignoring democratic objections in the brutal race for control of an innovation with great potential to do harm – and leaving the rest of us with little say in its development. Google is making this eye-catching move because the datacentres that power the explosive growth of generative AI consume huge amounts of electricity – more than the existing grid in the US or other western nations can readily supply. For today's newsletter, I spoke to technology journalist Chris Stokel-Walker, author of How AI Ate the World, about why the demand for power is growing so quickly – and whether we can trust big tech to handle the consequences.

Tech watchers and nerds like me get excited by tools such as ChatGPT. They look set to improve our lives in many ways – and hopefully augment our jobs rather than replace them. But in general, the public hasn't been so enamoured of the AI "revolution". Make no mistake: artificial intelligence will have a transformative effect on how we live and work – it is already being used to draft legal letters and analyse lung-cancer scans. ChatGPT was also the fastest-growing app in history after it was released. That said, four in 10 Britons haven't heard of ChatGPT, according to a recent survey by the University of Oxford, and only 9% use it weekly or more frequently.

The UK's AI safety summit opens at Bletchley Park this week, and is the passion project of Rishi Sunak: a prime minister desperate for a good news story as his government looks down the barrel of a crushing election defeat. Sunak appears to want progress on AI to become his lasting legacy. Last week, he delivered a speech about the risks of AI if weaponised by terrorists and cybercriminals, and published a series of documents on "frontier AI", an industry term for generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. He even unveiled a UK AI safety institute. The slick – albeit very behind in the polls – Stanford MBA grad who likes to holiday in California had, to use a favoured phrase of his, "got to grips" with the problem.