OpenAI boss Sam Altman says Gen Z is chasing yesterday's trends
OpenAI boss Sam Altman sees a chronic lack of ambition in Gen Z. Students keep chasing what was cool five years ago instead of building with AI. Americans filed 5.7 million new business applications in 2025 as the job market shifts.
Why it matters to you
If you are starting a business today, building your operations around artificial intelligence from the ground up may be the edge you need to outpace older competitors.
Young workers entering the job market face a landscape being upended by artificial intelligence. Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab behind ChatGPT, said that disruption is only getting started. Speaking at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Altman warned that massive numbers of tasks will soon be done better, cheaper, and faster by artificial intelligence.
He expressed chronic disappointment that business students always want to copy what was cool five years ago rather than try something new. Altman dropped out of Stanford in 2005 to cofound a location-based social networking startup called Loopt before leading startup accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019.
He urged ambitious workers to bet on what is next while the playing field is wide open. More Americans are already taking that entrepreneurial leap, filing 5.7 million applications to start new businesses in 2025. Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of the social media platform Reddit, argued that founders building with artificial intelligence from day one hold a default advantage over older companies.
Mark Cuban, the billionaire investor and former star of the television show Shark Tank, warned that failing to use artificial intelligence to move faster leaves entrepreneurs behind.
Photo: HaeB, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
