I was at SXSW London yesterday and watched George Osborne on the main stage. Osborne is following Nick Clegg in the British-politician-to-tech pipeline, he’s now Managing Director and Head of OpenAI for Countries, working to introduce OpenAI into national governments. The interview itself was pretty much a PR statement, with nothing answered with any real depth or nuance. One question about AI data centres included an answer about how OpenAI had offered tokens to local schools, among other things, as part of building their new data centre site in Saline Township, Michigan. That point made me sit up and listen because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it would have been like for my teen-self growing up in the AI world we have today.
The level playing field
When I was around seventeen, I dropped out of college. I’d been building internet projects for a couple of years already. My dad bought me a laptop, and that was a critical step in my path to where I am today.
What hit me when I started using it properly was that the machine on my desk was the same machine someone hacking together a startup in Silicon Valley was using. Same browser. Same text editor. Same connection to the open web. There was no infrastructure between me and an audience of millions other than the ideas I shipped. The thing I had with that laptop was a level playing field. Not equal capital or connections for sure, but the technical floor was the same.
Tokens are the new laptop
What that laptop did for me at seventeen, the LLM token bill does for me now. I currently spend around five hundred dollars a month on tokens, mostly across coding and research workflows. And I’m seeing an easy 10x in my output across coding yes, but also marketing, content creation and day-to-day admin too. The output of a working day in 2026 looks like something that would have taken a small team five days in 2018, and I say that having run small teams in 2018.
Any other founder reading this is paying a version of that bill, and we compare numbers. The numbers are only going up and could really jump if the model operators start charging what their paying to operate the models. And this means it’s no longer a level playing field to build, test and grow startups. If you don’t have the ability to pay this bill, you’re shipping at the pace of 2022 against people shipping at the pace of 2026.
The kids who can’t pay that bill, thinking back to my teenage self living in a £70 per week bedsit, are starting the next decade of their working lives with a gap that wasn’t there in mine.
Access alone is not enough
But it’s not just about access. A 2026 study on AI and the digital divide found that even when access to AI is equalised, a different gap opens up. Higher-attaining students tend to use AI as a scaffold for deeper inquiry. Lower-attaining students tend to use it as a substitutive tool for finishing assignments. The phrase the study uses is that inequality is defined not by access to the technology, but by the quality and purpose of its use.
Kids shouldn’t just have free model access. They should have free model access inside a structured environment that teaches them to use the thing the way I’m using it right now writing this post, as a research partner that pushes back rather than a copy-paste machine that produces the homework. That’s something that teachers and those building the curriculum will need to grapple with hard. And underneath it we will culturally need to figure out how to communicate the value of challenging yourself, learning and growing in a world where AI exists.
What I take from the Osborne moment
The reason I wanted to write this down? Currently the decision on “Who get’s free access to AI” is decided by ex-Chancellor on a main stage at SXSW London, giving PR-statement non-answers about deals targeted at college students who already have other routes to the same tools.
The interesting work is going to happen inside local schools across the country, with teachers, with specific kid. We need schools run by people who care about whether the technology stretches a teenager’s thinking or replaces it. And we need our government from the top down, thinking about equalizing that access so that a seventeen year old with ambition today still has a level playing field to build a business that can reach the world.