Sam Altman Urges Gen Z to Launch AI Startups Instead of Chasing Old Trends
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI will reshape jobs faster than many expect and argues that young workers should build new businesses on the technology rather than pursue familiar career paths.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI is about to reshape the job market Gen Z is entering, and he believes ambitious young workers can come out ahead if they are willing to abandon the conventional career playbook. Speaking in an interview with Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Altman said that a huge number of tasks people perform today will be done better, cheaper and faster by AI, and in many cases in entirely different ways.
Altman said that wide swaths of current jobs, at least as they are done today, will be handled entirely by AI. He also cautioned that the transformation will not happen as quickly as many people expect. Even so, he argued that the upheaval opens room for workers who are willing to ask what new businesses could be built with the technology. "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," Altman said. "I think this is a great time to go do the new thing."
For Altman, the opportunity extends beyond standing out in a tight job market. He believes AI could make possible businesses that would have been difficult or impossible to build only a few years ago. "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.
Altman has experience building companies from the ground up. In 2005, he dropped out of Stanford, where he was studying computer science, to cofound Loopt, a location-based social networking startup that was later acquired. He later joined the startup accelerator Y Combinator, serving as its president from 2014 to 2019. Drawing on that background, he told Stanford students that people who start their careers during periods of major change tend to do well. "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. "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."
Many Americans already appear to be acting on that instinct. In 2025, they filed 5.7 million applications to start new businesses, the highest annual total in the two decades the Census Bureau has tracked the data. Other prominent figures have made similar arguments. Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit cofounder, told Fortune last year that founders building with AI from the start have an edge because they are not trying to retrofit the technology into an older business. "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.
Billionaire entrepreneur and former Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban has also urged founders to treat AI as a competitive advantage rather than an optional extra. "If you're not using AI to move quicker and make smarter decisions, you're at a disadvantage," Cuban said in 2025. "The most successful entrepreneur will understand how to properly use AI."
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