Sam Altman advice for young people: why he says skip the safe path

His core advice is to start your career, or a company, during periods of big change. Altman argued that people with drive, fresh skills and an unusual way of looking at problems do best when an industry is shifting, because the playing field is at its most open. In his view, this is one of those moments, and it’s a great time to try the new thing rather than the familiar one.

That’s where the MBA complaint comes in. Altman said business students tend to choose the established route, the prestigious, well-trodden option, at exactly the time when AI is creating openings for companies that would have been hard or impossible to start a few years ago. He added that it isn’t the moment to build another OpenAI. Instead, he expects many companies built on top of OpenAI’s technology to grow larger, and he hopes more important, than OpenAI itself.

He admitted he nearly fell into the same trap. As a Stanford student he had an investment banking internship lined up, mostly because the smart people around him wanted one, and he later called it giving in to peer pressure. Then Y Combinator offered to cover his summer living costs for a project with friends, and he took that as his sign to become a founder.

Altman said he doesn’t expect a job apocalypse. He does expect huge numbers of everyday tasks to be done better, cheaper and faster by AI, and some kinds of jobs to be handed over almost entirely. But he stressed that the shift will take time and won’t arrive all at once.

He used mathematicians as an example. After OpenAI’s recent maths results, he said, the reaction in that community swung within days from disbelief to panic to a calmer view: some kinds of maths work are over, but most of the job was always about understanding ideas and explaining them to people. He pointed to programmers, who were once told their jobs were finished but whose ability to make computers do things is now paid better than ever, and to consultants, arguing that people still want to talk to a person even if AI can build the slides.

Asked what people should learn, Altman told a story about two teachers. One insisted that cursive handwriting mattered; he rebelled and still can’t write it. Another taught him that writing is a tool for learning how to think, and that lesson stuck.

His takeaway for students:

• Skills that train your thinking, such as writing and reasoning through problems, will stay very valuable.
• Skills that machines are clearly taking over are worth less each year, so don’t build a career on them.
• Being useful to other people is, in his words, a surprisingly learnable skill.
• Learn by doing. He said founding a company taught him faster than anything else, and recommended trying things early, then reflecting on what worked, instead of preparing forever.

He also argued that work done by humans keeps its meaning because people care about what other people do, not what machines do for their own sake.

Altman is speaking from his own story. He dropped out of Stanford in 2005 after two years of computer science to co-found Loopt, a location-sharing app that was later sold, then ran the startup accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. Taking a big swing is easier when you have a Stanford network, investors who return your calls and a safety net if it fails.

He also runs an AI company that benefits when more people build businesses on its models, so his enthusiasm isn’t neutral. That doesn’t make him wrong, but it’s one executive’s view. Other tech figures, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and investor Mark Cuban, have made similar calls to build around AI.

You don’t need to quit your job and start a company to use the useful part of his advice. A few practical takeaways for graduates and early-career workers in the US, UK or Canada:

• Audit your tasks. List the parts of your job that are routine and repeatable. Those are the parts most exposed, so steer your growth toward the judgment, people and communication parts.
• Get fluent with AI tools now. The programmers doing well are the ones who make computers do more, not the ones avoiding them.
• Keep writing. If writing is how you learn to think, outsourcing all of it to a chatbot weakens the skill Altman says matters most.
• Look at new teams, not just famous names. Smaller companies building on AI are where he expects the next big employers to come from.