Sam Altman has urged young workers entering an increasingly AI-driven job market to consider building new businesses, arguing that periods of disruption can create opportunities for people willing to challenge established career paths.
The OpenAI chief executive said many tasks currently carried out by people would eventually be completed “better, cheaper, and faster by AI”, although he cautioned that the transformation may not happen as quickly as some expect.
Speaking in an interview with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business last week, Altman said “wide swaths” of existing jobs would be handled by AI, at least in their current form.
He criticised what he described as a tendency among MBA students to pursue careers that had been fashionable several years earlier. “My chronic disappointment with MBA students is that they always want to go do the thing that was cool five years ago rather than try something new,” he said.
“I think this is a great time to go do the new thing.”
Sam Altman says AI is opening the door to new businesses
Altman said the opportunity extended beyond gaining an advantage in the jobs market. He believes companies built on top of OpenAI’s technology could become larger and more significant than OpenAI itself.
“There are many companies that can be built on top of the technology OpenAI has put out into the world that will be much bigger and, I hope, more important than OpenAI,” he said.
His own career included leaving Stanford in 2005 while studying computer science to co-found Loopt, a location-based social networking start-up that was later acquired. He subsequently joined the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, serving as its president from 2014 to 2019.
Addressing Stanford students, Altman said people starting their careers during a period of major change could benefit from a less established competitive landscape.
“If you’re heading into the world right now to work on something, I think you want to start your career at a time of the greatest change, when the playing field is most open,” he said.
He added: “I think people with high potential, drive, ideas, a new way of looking at things, and new skills tend to do relatively well when the ground is shaking the most.”
There are signs of growing interest in entrepreneurship in the United States. Americans filed 5.7 million applications to start new businesses in 2025, the highest annual figure recorded by the Census Bureau in the two decades it has tracked the data.
Alexis Ohanian, who has traced the origins of Reddit to a visit to Waffle House when he was 19, has also argued that companies founded in the AI era can have an advantage because the technology is embedded in their operations from the outset.
“Anyone who has started a company in the last two years has been building a company in the AI age, and they are at a default advantage, because the DNA of their organization is in this new world,” he said last year.
Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur and former Shark Tank investor, has likewise described AI as a competitive advantage rather than an optional tool.
“If you’re not using [AI] to move faster or make smarter decisions, you’re behind,” Cuban said in 2025. “AI isn’t just a tool, it’s leverage. If you’re not using AI to move quicker and make smarter decisions, you’re at a disadvantage.”
