OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has expressed disappointment with MBA students for pursuing business ideas and career paths that were popular years ago rather than exploring new opportunities emerging from artificial intelligence.
(Also read: Sam Altman praises Elon Musk on Tesla's flying Roadster launch a year after spat over $50,000 refund)
Speaking in an interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business, Altman said the AI revolution could reward young professionals willing to take risks and build something different, Fortune reported.
'My chronic disappointment with MBA students'
“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.”
He warned that AI would dramatically change the workplace, taking over many tasks currently performed by humans.
{{/usCountry}}He warned that AI would dramatically change the workplace, taking over many tasks currently performed by humans.
{{/usCountry}}“It’s totally true that huge numbers of tasks that people do today will be done better, cheaper, and faster by AI—and completely differently,” he said.
However, Altman suggested the transition would take longer than some expect. Rather than viewing the upheaval only as a threat, he encouraged graduates to identify possibilities that did not exist before.
AI could create a new generation of businesses
“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,” Altman said.
Altman left Stanford in 2005 to co-found Loopt, a startup later acquired. He subsequently led startup accelerator Y Combinator before becoming OpenAI's CEO.
(Also read: Sam Altman slammed over ChatGPT use case for parents, internet says ‘just talk to your kids')
“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 told students.
Entrepreneurial interest remains strong in the US, with nearly 5.7 million applications to start new businesses filed in 2025.
Other entrepreneurs back AI-first founders
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has similarly argued that companies built around AI from the outset may have an advantage over older businesses trying to adapt.
“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 told Fortune in 2025.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban echoed that sentiment, warning: “If you’re not using [AI] to move faster or make smarter decisions, you’re behind.”